When Life Hands You Banana Peels…Slide, Learn, and Move On

Years ago I worked in banking. It was bonus time and part of my job was to calculate the managers' bonuses. I had a huge spreadsheet with all the goals used to assess performance and a separate sheet for each manager. It was after hours. I needed to finish the calculations and run them by the senior executive, my boss, for approval. Then I'd make adjustments and send the results to the managers. Nobody could go home until it was done, so I was under pressure.

I double-checked the figures, cross-checked the calculations, dotted my i's and crossed my t's, then sent the file to the head honcho. We tweaked, he approved, and gave me the go ahead to send out the numbers. I created an email, attached the file, and hit send.

Before the whooshing of the outgoing email had finished, I realized my enormous gaffe. I had forgotten to separate out the sheets, so had just sent a file to every manager that contained every other manager's salary and bonus information. Now everyone knew what everyone else was making and I was in a world of trouble.

I'll admit I considered for a moment just keeping my mouth shut and hoping no one would notice, but we all know how that kind of thing comes back to bite you in the end, so I trudged into my boss's office, head hung low, and delivered the news.

By rights, he could have fired me on the spot. Breech of confidential information, creating issues of inequality among employees, general stupidity. I was guilty of them all. Fortunately for me, my boss was a reasonable man. He understood I'd been working under pressure and he employed his own diffusion techniques with his staff. The situation didn't escalate and all I got was a few good-natured jabs from some of the managers. But I learned a lesson that has served me well for more than a decade now: Check, check, and check again, and never hit the send button in haste.

Over the years, I've made plenty of other gaffes of a more personal nature-enquiring after a colleague's "fabulous" husband at the office party, only to learn that he'd left her for another woman; asking a woman when her baby was due...when the baby was already a month old; and addressing a Christmas card to my uncle and his wife, whose death earlier in the year had somehow escaped my memory. If I was a sit-com writer, I'd have no shortage of material.

In all these cases I prayed for the ground to open up and swallow me, but it didn't. I spent a small amount of time beating myself up for being such a fool, but that didn't help either. In the end, all I could do was apologize and learn, and then implement a plan to make sure I never make the same mistake again. Before sending out cards every year I check with my mother for "changes in status;" I never ask questions about forthcoming babies unless I am 100 percent certain a woman is pregnant; and I keep office small talk small and stick to subjects like the food, the weather, or the person's dress, until they offer a more interesting fact about themselves that I can latch onto.

Everyone makes mistakes, but beating ourselves up doesn't help. You have to let it go and move on. The key is to grow from the experience, and to put a check in place so you don't keep making the same gaffes.

So the next time life throws you a banana peel, just hang ten, slide on through, and for goodness sake, make sure you don't let a good learning opportunity go to waste.