The letter missing from the sign

A man in Doha has paid for a large printed sign above his new tile shop on a busy road. On the morning it goes up, he stands across the street to admire it and sees that one letter is missing from the word for bathrooms.

For a moment it feels like a catastrophe. The sign is enormous. Thousands of cars will pass it every day. He imagines every one of them noticing, laughing, deciding that a shop which cannot spell cannot be trusted with a floor.

Then the week goes on, and almost nothing happens.

Customers come in and ask about prices. Nobody mentions the sign. A neighbour points it out once, kindly, and they both laugh. The printer agrees to fix it in a fortnight. By then he has nearly stopped seeing it himself.

Most of our mistakes live in this category. They look enormous to the person who made them, in the minute they are discovered, and barely register with anyone else. A wrong time in a message. A price tag left upside down. A missing letter, ten metres high. The world absorbs them and carries on.

None of this is a case for being careless. He was right to check the design, to choose a good printer, to want it right. That care shows in everything else about the shop, and customers feel it.

But care and perfection are different projects. Care can be finished. Perfection never can, and the person chasing it ends up anxious, late and frozen, which costs far more than a single missing letter ever will.

The shop opened on time. That was the part that mattered.