Tag Archives: mistake

A Reflection on Age and Memory

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Today started with me examining the wreckage of my latest senior moment. However, the first thing I concluded was that it wasn’t a senior moment. It was just a mistake.

 

I’ve been worrying about making mistakes recently as i have made a few. I made the same submission to a magazine two days apart last month, forgetting I had already done it. Before that I prepared a submission and forgot to send it, which was a nuisance. Some months before that I sent the same poem to two different editors, which is a bad thing to do as it means writing to withdraw the poem as soon as you know you’ve done it. This is, I’m sure, irritating to the editor and makes me look like an idiot.  As I make more and more mistakes, I have begun to worry about my declining mental faculties and wonder about dementia. My mum had Parkinson’s and my dad had dementia. I don’t really want either.

In truth, as you get older you do get a little vaguer, which is why I have a pocket diary. I’m still not sure whether I had long COVID or not, which wouldn’t have helped. Then, as Julia says, I am disorganised and don’t get enough sleep. And I do submit a lot of poems.

Last year I made 78 submissions. This year I have already done 79 and will probably manage 100.  It’s not surprising I’m making mistakes. However, I am organising myself better. Apart from cutting out the mistakes this is already allowing me more time to write and, as a result, things are already going better.

Well, until today.  I was getting the submission together and called up the magazine’s website, as every magazine seems to have its own requirements. This makes submitting a touch irksome at times (particularly when they change them without telling you) I presume it makes the editing process easier. That seems fair. I have a handful of poems to cope with, they have thousands.

Anyway, when I checked this morning, I found I’d missed the submission date. It was last month, not this month. I presume it was a copying error when I was making the submission plan for the year. That, I think, is actually just a mistake and not a senior moment. And that is where we started.

Tomorrow I will give you my definition of “senior moment”.

Photos are wood turning by Julia – at least she goes from strength to strength in retirement. 🙂

8th October 2014 (Part 1)

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It’s strange, because I can tell you exactly what I was doing on that day. I was writing a blog post.

I can tell you what I was doing six years and two days later. I was writing another blog post, and in doing that, I pressed the “Publish” button too soon and published a twenty one word blog post.

Having added a few more words I am going to add “Part 1” to the title to make it look like I did it deliberately.

Then I will sneak away and write “Part 2”.

I tried to make it private to get away without anyone noticing, but see I have already been rumbled…

Life_As_I_Interpret commented – interesting… tell us more.

 

 

 

A Short Note on Difficult Customers

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Sometimes on eBay you run up against an immovable object. With over a thousand items listed for sale at any time we are obviously going to make mistakes. In nine months we’ve sent the wrong item twice and had one complaint about quality. That’s less than quarter of a per cent.

We now have another complaint. With hindsight we should have expected it as the buyer asked for a discount before buying. We politely declined but he ordered anyway. We then had a letter of complaint telling us this was the worst lot he’d ever bought and various other things.

We offered him his money back.

He’s just replied that we’ve missed the point. He doesn’t want to send them back for a refund, he wants to struggle selling them and moan that the charity he sells for will lose money. He’s very keen to tell you he sells for charity.

There’s not much you can do to help some people.

Cynicism prompts me to suggest that his next note will contain a threat about negative feedback and another suggestion about discount. After all, he does sell for charity you know…

Mistakes…

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Did you know that the Cook Islands Dollar and the Isle of Man have some obverse designs that are almost identical on their coins? I didn’t until this morning.

However, after opening a complaint from a customer that got a Cook Islands Dollar featuring the Coronation coach when they had been expecting an Isle of Man Crown featuring the Coronation coach I am now well aware of the fact.

I used a general coin photo at the top, just to remind you how grim these things are.

A simple enquiry would have sufficed. It’s bad enough having to sort everything out without sarcastic demands for explanations. I have hundreds of irritatingly similar coins, I was in a hurry as the post office closes early on Saturday, I should have organised things better, I made a mistake. It’s the first time in approximately 700 parcels that I’ve sent the wrong thing out.

I waited a few minutes before responding to their sarky note. It’s better that way.

The man who rang later that afternoon was not so fortunate. As I sat brooding on my mistake and throbbing with toothache, he told me he was from British Telecom and he needed to access my computer…

To be honest, there’s something quite satisfying about being rude to a wannabe fraudster.