Mistakes, Apologies

Mistakes are common, so are apologies to some extent. I am eager to meet a person who never committed even a single mistake in his life, so that he can commit the first one. I am equally eager to meet a person who never heard an apology from anyone – just to tell him “I’m so sorry, it took such a long time for me to meet a person like you”!

“Apologizing always does not mean that you are wrong and the other person is right. It just means you value your relationship more than your ego.” – Anonymous.

Let me apologize first for not writing well some of my blogs which would not have met your expectations. But with the good comes the bad right? This is not to prove a point that I do not have or value much my ego. I am myself not happy on the quality of some of my blogs.  But then my secret to happiness is low expectations, though I am extremely happy for people who have high expectations. To be on a safer side, if at all you read my blogs, please read them first thing in the morning. As Mark Twain said, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day”.

One common mistake people make is falling prey to group thinking. In a group of ten people, if nine of them look at the same information and arrive at the exact same conclusion, it is the duty of the tenth person to disagree. He can play the role of a devil’s advocate and it will not be considered as mistake. If his views turn out to be wrong, then he can always tender an apology – verbal, written, unconditional, – in whichever form as required. So be the tenth man as required and disagree, and rest of the time try to listen to any tenth man.

This week , Skyalert, a mobile app company in Mexico City apologised to their users. Mexico City is prone to earth quakes. In 1985, at least 10,000 people were killed there because of an earth quake of magnitude 8.1. This week, their app alerted people to evacuate their buildings at noon, asking them to prepare for a quake within seconds. People vacated for obvious reasons, but then the alarm turned out to be a false one. There is nothing wrong in apologizing in this case without thinking much, as the inconvenience caused is not that much compared to the consequences at the event of the alarm does not go at all in a genuine situation.  

Once I had joined my friends and seniors to seek an apology from nobody less than chief engineer at the Electricity board. This was when I was in seventh standard. All because of one of my friends - Chandru. Chandru was an obedient student, would do exactly what our teachers advised. That day he ventured out to relieve himself. As one of the lessons taught to him was to “always explore new areas in life” he walked into a remote field. Then he remembered next lesson – “anything you do, do with an aim”. He aimed at the stay wire which was tied to the electric pole, ( A stay wire is used so that the electric pole do not fall on to the ground due to any unforeseen reason. Normally these stay wires are insulated from the live electric line so that no current could pass through them. ) Unfortunately in this particular set up somehow the live wire was in contact with the stay wire and it was as  lively as Chandru!. Rest you can imagine, all I can say is human urine is one of the best conductors of electricity. People working on the field saw Chandru collapsing and they rushed him to hospital, he survived with no much damage!

That’s when we decided to march to the electricity office to get an apology. The chief engineer did not budge initially. His argument was that the teachers should have prevented their students from wandering into stray places. Much educated fellow than us, did not have brains to understand that if those teachers had any control on us, we would not have been wandering in his equally stray place at the first place! After a bit of argument, he finally tendered a written apology to our leader. Good that the journalists and the press were not that active those days, else the next day front line news would have been “relieving but equally shocking experience”!

It is always a good practice to apologize for a mistake you committed. But, if you commit the same mistake again and then try to apologize, it may not be effective – people will not know where your mistake ends and where your apology starts.