Mistakes

Researchers have shown that many seemingly mindless mistakes result from a cascade of neurological shifts. In the half-minute preceding an error, activity increases in the brain's at-rest areas (red) and decreases in the brain's focus-maintaining regions (blue).
Courtesy National Academy of Sciences

No one likes making mistakes, but not all mistakes are created equally. There is a difference between regular mistakes, like bringing someone decaffeinated coffee when they asked for regular or wrongly positing that so-and-so definitely wrote the playing song in rehab when in fact the lyrics are lines from a Chinese poem and said singer merely composed the accompanying instrumentation on a Tahitian beach, margarita in hand, and a real mistake. "What is a real mistake?," you may be asking yourself aloud. This class of mistakes is further divided into subcategories: one that costs you people and one that costs you money. I have had my fair share of both, but wish to concentrate on the latter, with a fresh wound stabbing my heart and pocket.

Monetary mistakes always result in the "what if" game. What if I had not gone out Saturday night? What if I had become violently ill halfway through my first beer? What if I had been born before the era of expensive gadgets that break when you splash liquids into their electronic wiring? What if, indeed. But this game gets you nowhere and usually results in a longing for an alternate reality in which you are a rich duchess, or at least not financially liable.

Before my current miscue, my worst financial mistakes had been:

1. Parking in a tow zone.
2. Parking in a super-center that turned into a tow zone when it closed for the night.

I had previously thought there was absolutely no way I could top my parking faux pas (for they emptied my wallet and created a time-sucking vacuum of impossible, flaming bureaucratic hoops, resulting in my loss of dignity and respect for some heartless city of Atlanta employees.) But I have managed to make the most feared mistake of the technological era: spilling beer on my friend's laptop. If I survive this so called "experience" I will not take away some deep life lesson, other than shunning technology to become a bitter Luddite.