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Authors: Jeremy Clarkson
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ex-husband will be here. And no, I’m not going to tow you out of the paddock if it turns into a quagmire.
You’ll probably have a miserable time but look at it this way. It’ll be much more miserable for me, and even more miserable for the poor old dear who lives next door. As the band wheeled in their speaker stacks, I called her to explain that there might be a bit of noise on Saturday night. ‘Oh I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘What is it? A dinner dance?’
No, not really, it’s more a chance for all my wife’s wildly disparate groups of friends to come and not get on with each other.
Sunday 10 June 2001
How Big a Mistake are
You
Going to Make?
Many years ago, when I was working as a local newspaper reporter, the editor sent me to cover the inquest of a miner who’d been squashed by an underground train.
Hours into the interminable proceedings a solicitor acting for the National Coal Board told the court that the deceased ‘could’ have stood in an alcove as the train passed. And I wrote this down in my crummy shorthand.
But unfortunately, when I came to write the story, I failed to transcribe the meaningless hieroglyphics properly. So what actually appeared in the paper was that the man ‘should’ have stood in an alcove as the train passed.
Well, there was hell to pay. Damages were handed over. A prominent apology was run. The lawyer in question shouted at me. The family of the dead man shouted at me. The editor shouted at me. The proprietor shouted at me. I was given a formal written warning about my slapdash attitude. And here I am, twenty years later, with my own column in the
Sunday Times
.
We hear similar stories from the City all the time. Some trader, dazzled by the stripes on his shirt, presses the wrong button on his keyboard and the stock market loses 10 per cent of its value. He gets a roasting andlater in the year spends his seven-figure bonus on a six-bedroom house in Oxfordshire.
So I feel desperately sorry for the Heathrow air traffic controller who was found last week to be guilty of negligence when he tried to land a British Airways 747 on top of a British Midland Airbus. He has been demoted and sent in eternal shame to wave table tennis bats at light aircraft in the Orkneys.
The problem here is that we all make mistakes, but the result of these mistakes varies drastically depending on the environment in which we make them.
When a supermarket checkout girl incorrectly identifies a piece of broccoli as cabbage and you are overcharged by 15p, nobody really cares.
But what about the man who incorrectly identified a live bullet as blank, put it into the magazine of an SA-80 army rifle and heard later that a seventeen-year-old Royal Marine had been killed as a result?
The inquest last week recorded a verdict of accidental death and now the dead soldier’s father is said to be considering a private prosecution and a civil action against the people responsible for his son’s death. I don’t blame him, of course. I would do the same. But the fact remains that as mistakes go, loading the wrong bullets into a magazine is exactly the same as loading the wrong information about broccoli into a checkout weighing machine.
Think about the chap who was employed by P&O ferries to shut the front doors on the car ferry
Herald of Free Enterprise
. I have no doubt that he performed hisbadly paid, noisy, repetitive and unpleasant job with the utmost diligence until one day, for reasons that are not clear, he forgot.
Now if he had been a warehouseman who forgot to shut the factory gates when he left for the night, there may well have been a burglary. And that may well have put a dent in the insurance company’s profit and loss account. But he wasn’t a warehouseman and, as a result of his momentary lapse, water rushed into the car deck and 90 seconds later the ship was on its side. And 193 people were dead.
He was not drunk at the time. He did not leave the doors open to see what would happen.
You’ll probably have a miserable time but look at it this way. It’ll be much more miserable for me, and even more miserable for the poor old dear who lives next door. As the band wheeled in their speaker stacks, I called her to explain that there might be a bit of noise on Saturday night. ‘Oh I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘What is it? A dinner dance?’
No, not really, it’s more a chance for all my wife’s wildly disparate groups of friends to come and not get on with each other.
Sunday 10 June 2001
How Big a Mistake are
You
Going to Make?
Many years ago, when I was working as a local newspaper reporter, the editor sent me to cover the inquest of a miner who’d been squashed by an underground train.
Hours into the interminable proceedings a solicitor acting for the National Coal Board told the court that the deceased ‘could’ have stood in an alcove as the train passed. And I wrote this down in my crummy shorthand.
But unfortunately, when I came to write the story, I failed to transcribe the meaningless hieroglyphics properly. So what actually appeared in the paper was that the man ‘should’ have stood in an alcove as the train passed.
Well, there was hell to pay. Damages were handed over. A prominent apology was run. The lawyer in question shouted at me. The family of the dead man shouted at me. The editor shouted at me. The proprietor shouted at me. I was given a formal written warning about my slapdash attitude. And here I am, twenty years later, with my own column in the
Sunday Times
.
We hear similar stories from the City all the time. Some trader, dazzled by the stripes on his shirt, presses the wrong button on his keyboard and the stock market loses 10 per cent of its value. He gets a roasting andlater in the year spends his seven-figure bonus on a six-bedroom house in Oxfordshire.
So I feel desperately sorry for the Heathrow air traffic controller who was found last week to be guilty of negligence when he tried to land a British Airways 747 on top of a British Midland Airbus. He has been demoted and sent in eternal shame to wave table tennis bats at light aircraft in the Orkneys.
The problem here is that we all make mistakes, but the result of these mistakes varies drastically depending on the environment in which we make them.
When a supermarket checkout girl incorrectly identifies a piece of broccoli as cabbage and you are overcharged by 15p, nobody really cares.
But what about the man who incorrectly identified a live bullet as blank, put it into the magazine of an SA-80 army rifle and heard later that a seventeen-year-old Royal Marine had been killed as a result?
The inquest last week recorded a verdict of accidental death and now the dead soldier’s father is said to be considering a private prosecution and a civil action against the people responsible for his son’s death. I don’t blame him, of course. I would do the same. But the fact remains that as mistakes go, loading the wrong bullets into a magazine is exactly the same as loading the wrong information about broccoli into a checkout weighing machine.
Think about the chap who was employed by P&O ferries to shut the front doors on the car ferry
Herald of Free Enterprise
. I have no doubt that he performed hisbadly paid, noisy, repetitive and unpleasant job with the utmost diligence until one day, for reasons that are not clear, he forgot.
Now if he had been a warehouseman who forgot to shut the factory gates when he left for the night, there may well have been a burglary. And that may well have put a dent in the insurance company’s profit and loss account. But he wasn’t a warehouseman and, as a result of his momentary lapse, water rushed into the car deck and 90 seconds later the ship was on its side. And 193 people were dead.
He was not drunk at the time. He did not leave the doors open to see what would happen.
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