There's that moment of panic when you realize you've messed something up, and it's totally your fault, and there's nothing you can do about it. In a way that's a cool feeling -- in the same way that sometimes any feeling is a cool feeling, better than no feeling at all, and just gets the adrenaline pumping in a way that feels kind of invigorating every so often. And I guess I'm talking needless panicking -- because panicking about real, actual, serious mistakes (oops, the scalpel shouldn't have gone that deep!) is not cool on any level, and even mistakes that aren't life or death, but fire-able offense kind of mistakes -- I don't know what that is at a law firm... falsifying information? I don't know enough to name a laundry list of these things.

All this is to lead up to a silly little anecdote about a stupid mistake I made this afternoon that at the moment I realized it felt pretty disastrous, but that was just the adrenaline response, and then I realized it was just a stupid little mistake, and I'll probably survive. Basically, I was working on the fourth draft of something, and accidentally e-mailed the initial rough draft out as the "latest version" reflecting all corrections -- I'd saved it in a different file and clicked on the wrong one to attach -- and then got back a whole set of comments that were in large part repeats of comments I'd already seen -- because the old draft didn't have them corrected like the new draft did.

So when I got it back, I panicked. "So now the partner must think I'm too stupid to make the changes he wrote on the last version, and must be wondering why I would ignore his comments like that, and be pissed off that I was forcing him to write the same comments all over again, wasting his time, and just being stupid." That was the basic gist of the story I started to tell myself. And maybe that's completely the case.

But probably my explanation that I attached the wrong file will make sense, and instead he can just think I'm too stupid to attach the right file. Which is less damning than being too stupid to make the changes I've been asked to make. So I'll take that.

I'll find out in the morning whether this is a fire-able offense. I'm guessing not. But, hey, you never know. Stay tuned... :)