They say that every new job has a learning curve, and we shouldn’t feel bad about making mistakes at this time, because they’re all part of the process. But what if those mistaken happen to be very, very expensive? Like, in the millions of dollars expensive? How can you even justify, for example, that a $290 million satellite just toppled onto the floor as if it were an old tree? Or that you basically split an entire Victorian house in two because of a crane mishap?
And what if the expensive mistake wasn’t made at work, but during your down time? The accidents probably wouldn’t involve so much money, but not having the learning curve excuse might make it even worse, right? After all, when you do something like parking your car on the beach while completely ignoring a little natural event called a tide, you can’t really say “well, it’s all part of the process…”
[post_page_title]An out-of-this-world ‘oops'[/post_page_title]
This is one of those examples of people who really, really, messed up, that fall into the category of “no matter how badly we botch something at work, at least we won’t compare to that case where…”
What happened in this particular scenario? NASA lost $327.6 million after its Mars Orbiter went down due to human error – the teams responsible for navigating it didn’t communicate properly about which measurement system they were using for the calculation of trajectories. In the end, one used the imperial system, while the other used metric.
