By Marina Campoy-LoVasco (‘23)

Human error. Human error causes uncertainty. Did I forget to turn off the stove? Or the sink? Is the sink slowly filling with water? Now it’s dripping onto the floor of the bathroom. It’s making its way beneath the crack of the door into the hallway. It gushes down the stairs. Soon my house is filled with water. My goldfish is having a great time. He’s never been in a fish tank so big. Oh wait, nevermind. I turned off the sink before I left.

It’s human to make mistakes. And it’s said that no one makes the same mistake twice, right? The problem with that statement is that it’s only true if the person is aware they have made a mistake. I can assure you that everyone, you and me included, has made the same mistake thousands of times. But our mistake is not hurting anyone, not hurting us, so we haven’t changed. Meanwhile, if we were making mistakes saying things like 1+1 was 5, then we’d be in trouble. Then we’d change. 

For example, the way I put on my shoes when I rush out the door for school is definitely a mistake. I don’t untie the laces and just squeeze my foot in somehow. Sure, it breaks the back of the shoe, but it doesn’t hurt me enough to do something about it. I guess that’s why slip on shoes were made. Yeah, we  humans take routes to cover up our mistakes too, so we don’t learn from them. We just find a way to stop dealing with them. 

And our errors are only really good when we learn from them because the world can’t run on them. The world is like a computer. Computers run on code and when there are mistakes in said code the computer doesn’t do what it needs to. The only solution is to comb through the code and find your mistake and fix it. I would contend  it’s even more complicated in real life because unlike the isolated code you are using to make your website, the code of our life affects everybody else’s. If you make one mistake then you affect one person. Elif you affect two people. Elif you affect four people. Elif you affect ten people.  Elif you affect fifty people.  Elif you affect two hundred people.  Elif you affect five thousand people. Elif you affect one million people. Else, you affect the whole world.