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Five Simple Ways to Avoid Stupid Mistakes at Work
My boss had just come back from a meeting with the client executive. They were presenting numbers from a financial analysis they did, and the client executive mentioned that the numbers seemed off.
Since I was responsible for the financial analysis, I double-checked the numbers. With dreadful realization, I realized why the numbers were off. I had copy-pasted the numbers from a PDF that had superscripts. For example, if the number was ⁸⁴¹, the copy-pasted number became 841. The numbers I had pasted in were off by a factor of ten. And since I was multiplying these numbers with others, this meant that the numbers were off by a factor of ten or more.
Knowing that hiding or covering the mistake was worse than telling my boss, I told my boss what had happened. The only saving grace was that this was my first major project, and that I was new to the job.
From that day forward, I decided that I would set up some simple strategies to avoid stupid mistakes at work. Unfortunately, many of these were ones that I learned from making the mistake anyway, but I hope that you can learn from my mistakes so you never have to make the same one in your work.
