Double Fault

The easiest thing to do is to take your time and getting something right the first time. This is especially so when no one is expecting you to do anything. You're acting on nothing but your own impatience. This happens to me often. It's an overreaction to the fear that I won't do the thing at all. I'm susceptible to paralysis by analysis, and so the grapes can die on the vine while I try to get them just right. Sometimes I run them out there prematurely.

Sometimes, against all odds, the thing I hurry out actually is in good shape, but it's really the exception. What happens more often is that I see some unacceptable mistake (which is perhaps unacceptable only in my mind), and I have to fix it. The trouble is that I am now so flustered that I feel I must rush out a correction. This has the effect of introducing a flaw even worse than was there already into the thing I'm doing.

An example is the dynamite tweet I came up with. I thought that was hilarious enough that I wanted it to appear on Twitter and Facebook, so I added the hashtag "#FB", which will simultaneously post a tweet on my Facebook account as well as my Twitter. It took a minute to show up on Facebook, but by that time I had panicked and compounded my mistake with a lot of frenetic deletions and re-postings. It was rather senseless.

I guess it's a small matter at such a level as that. Probably no one noticed my poor conduct, or didn't recognize it as such. Why would they? The odds are generally that any particular thing a person says or writes goes unnoticed entirely. It's like the anecdote I recall about some film extra dropping some groceries they were carrying in the background of a shot. They came up to the camera warning that the shot should be cut. Of course no one would have noticed or cared (since people do drop groceries in real life), and the only problem was warning of the problem. I guess that's what this is.