After the missed exit

A driver in Doha misses his exit on the expressway. It happens. The sign came late, a lorry was in the way, he was thinking about something else.

What happens next is the part that matters. Flustered, he cuts across two lanes to take the next turning, which turns out to lead somewhere worse, and then he brakes hard to correct that. The missed exit cost him five minutes. The scramble afterwards nearly cost him the car.

Most real trouble starts this way. Not with the first error, but with the one that follows it.

The first one is close to unavoidable. People who do anything at all will get things wrong: the wrong size sent to a customer, the wrong name on an invitation, the wrong figure in a quote. Nobody gets through a working week without one.

The second mistake is a different animal. It comes from what the first one does to us. We lose our rhythm. We feel watched. We rush to make the problem disappear, and in the rush we make a worse one. Or, just as often, we try to make it disappear by hiding it, and the hiding becomes the thing people remember.

A shop that sends the wrong item has made an ordinary error. A shop that then insists the customer ordered it that way has made the one that loses them.

The second mistake is the one that responds to practice. Slow down after the first one. Say what happened. Take the long way round and accept the five minutes.

Nobody can promise never to miss an exit. Anyone can learn not to swerve.