Routine Mistakes

[Park Kraken]

You know how you get in a habit of doing something and you do it so much that you don't think you could forget to do it and stop doing the safety checks to make sure you did it?

Well, I've been a little off lately, off schedule and off balance. One of our company supervizors died recently, quite suddenly, and his wife, also a supervisor, has fled to Ohio to come to grips with the event, so I've been running around filling in for people so they could take off for the viewing and funeral, etc., and on my way to work to fill in again, I stop at a gas station to get some gas. I go to pull what I think is my wallet out of my pocket and find myself leafing through the pages of Stephen Coont's Deep Black Biowar for my debit card. Ooops.

Luckily I had my cell phone and called a freind to come loan me some money. So here I am at said gas station pratically out of gas, sitting on my bed, when a sheriff pulls up and asks if everything is ok. I start to answer him, but stop, thinking of what he'll do if I say my wallet is missing. So I tell him everything is ok, I just left my money at home. He pulls away. Dodged that bullet. Person arrives to give me money, I proceed to work, 15 minutes late, and everything turns out ok in the end.

Lesson learned; never take routines for granted.

[Oriadin]

Reminds me of two guys I used to work with who went to a presentation together. They stopped of at a petrol station and while one was filling up, the other went in the shop to get something to eat and drink. The one filling up thought the other had paid while in the shop, and the one in the shop thought the other had paid by credit card at the pump. So, they ended up leaving without paying at all!

About a week later the police turn up to work as it was a company car and they had to try and remember what had happened. Everything was sorted and they paid up but of course they got a hell of a lot of stick for it at work. :D

Lesson learned; never take ANYTHING for granted.

[Khendon Sevon]

Yeah, I was writing a stack data structure today and using a linked list as its method of organizing the data. I've done this a thousand times before and happily coded without doing much testing.

When I was done with the 125 lines of code (not that much) I ran the app and did some debugging. Uh oh, it wasn't working right! I had forgotten that C isn't object oriented and was using the linked list structure I had coded in a way that didn't fly with the language.

It took about 10 min to recode the entire thing with an array instead; but, that was 10 minutes I could've spent writing this posted instead ;)

What?

I don't know.