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Random Forays: What’s life without a faux pas or two?
Bloopers aplenty keep happening in our lives
Bloopers aplenty keep happening in our lives. We might believe that we do the right thing all the time, but often, we slip up. We, for instance, may make a blooper by identifying a person wrongly or altogether fail to recognise them. My grandmother used to have a tough time calling one of her five daughters. She would name the other four and before correctly arriving at the fifth.
Just a slip of tongue or a memory lapse or habit often leads to an inadvertent blunder. Also, we often are left thinking “Who is this person?” and our facial expressions are often a giveaway — laying bare the secret. Lately, I have begun asking the person directly after having played pretend for at times. The ladies have always been easier to remember, you see.
Bloopers may also arise when you lose your keys or your parking slip or your phone even. My family knows precisely what they can and cannot trust me with!
We could also err in the sense of carrying out an incorrect financial transaction. Maybe we failed at adding the extra zero or deleted one or sent funds to an unintended recipient. Such mistakes can be pretty damaging, of course.
Even more grave, however, are the mistakes related to relationships. For instance, we may send out a message praising someone inappropriately or (worse) declare our love for someone. When that someone turns out to be an uncomfortably wrong “someone else”, we could land in serious trouble! All of that, simply because we read a name wrong and pressed the wrong buttons!
Sometimes we might end up at the wrong place instead of the desired destination. Arriving at one particular town when you thought you were somewhere totally different, that can also happen!
A family member of mine thought that she was driving off to Rajpura once, but ended up in Ambala while chatting with her daughters!
At times, an employer may hand out an appointment letter to Rajkumar X instead of a Rajkumar Y. Such eventualities may even happen in government at times, but efforts have been made to codify employee IDs.
At times, human errors are really serious and they may actually have a life-changing impact. Cricket legend Sunny Gavaskar was exchanged with another baby when he himself was a newborn and he might not have played for India or scored dozens of centuries had he been brought up in another home.
Another tough one is when two persons are writing to each other about someone and they send him or her that caustic text by mistake! Artists and writers often claim that they’re dreamers and should be allowed to slip up, when it comes to routine tasks. Not a valid excuse, perhaps!
A timekeeper, a banker, a jailor, an umpire, a scorekeeper, an accountant and the like, simply cannot afford to make any faux pas in their profession even if they forget their wife’s birthday at times. The last-mentioned eventuality has its own ramifications of course, but there is usually a rapprochement in the offing and love hopefully prevails in the end! An advertisement wherein the jeweller recommends a gift for the customer’s wife based on the “crime” which has been committed is also all too fresh in our minds.
Years ago, I was posted to a nondescript Haryana town and went off to join my new assignment, albeit reluctantly. Imagine my chagrin when a by-stander informed me that my destination was another 100 km away, when I had thought that I was almost there. He corrected himself quite rapidly through and declared that he had meant a hundred metres, which certainly assuaged my feelings.
The fact of the matter is that human beings are inherently imperfect. We can always be depended upon to commit blunders in the course of life’s journey. Rare is the one who shall always be meticulous to the core. In fact, how dull would life be, if it went utterly according to plan! Thank God it does not
