Thursday, January 22, 2015

Cascading Errors


This week, in my household, we have had a series of cascading errors. ( A phrase I learnt from airplane crashes,  where one small error triggers another and then a third,  and then it suddenly becomes catastrophic, though none of those errors on their own would have done much harm…)    and for a moment there,  not seriously,  but emotionally or energetically,  it all felt too much. 

The piece de resistance was when I thought I lost my keys and I had to leave the apartment to give my son lunch which he needed because he couldn’t leave school because he had arrived 5 minutes late last week and had his out-lunch pass cancelled… See what I mean by cascading error – one small thing goes wrong – and all of a sudden all the systems feel the strain and everything wobbles.  
I did leave and managed to get back into the apartment too.   And then, with the clarity of relief, I recalled where I had left my keys.  I also, through sheer luck, found another object that had been missing all week and driving us batty as we searched for it, to no avail.  And now the errors feel corrected.  The wobbles have stopped, the flight is smooth again.
Sometimes it only takes one reprieve to turn the plane around…
 
 
 
 

No comments:

Post a Comment