How Did That Happen?

Ever ask yourself that? There are times you ask and you really have no idea. Most of the time when unexpected things come up, we know right away what went wrong. “Oh, I forgot to tell you not to paint the fence when the wind is blowing.”

The other day, we delivered some windows to a client and one was way too big. The client asked, “How did that happen?” I didn’t have an answer. I had thought several times when I was making the window, “Is this really how long this window is?” It seemed too long, but I went back and checked our measurements and it was supposed to be that big.

When we discovered the problem, we took back the window to shorten it 40” and we checked our measurement. Yep, we wrote down that is was 84, not 44. Jeanne immediately took the blame, “It’s my handwriting, so I screwed up!” Then I pointed out that I was reading the tape measure and I could have read it out wrong, so there was really no way to determine who was to blame.

I used to be really ready to assign blame, but I’m actively trying to overcome that habit. Who cares who made the mistake, we still have to fix it and we’re both aware of what happened, so we’ll be vigilant to try to avoid the same thing in the future. A friend told me that when he measures. He first takes all measurements in inches, then he re-measures in feet and inches. This way he has two sets of numbers and when a question comes up, he can verify that they are both the same length. If not, he can pinpoint the fact that there really is a problem.