My Bad

Oops! We take a look at some of the colossal blunders of history for a lesson on humility and repentance.

One afternoon a carpet layer had just finished installing carpet for a lady. He stepped out for a smoke, only to realize that he had lost his cigarettes. After a quick, but fruitless search, he noticed that in the middle of the room, under the carpet that he had just installed, was a bump. His cigarettes!

“No sense pulling up the entire floor for one pack of smokes,” the carpet layer said to himself. So, he got out his mallet and flattened the bump.

Not long after, as he was cleaning up, the lady came in. “Here,” she said, handing him his pack of cigarettes. “I found them in the hallway. Now,” she said, “if only I could find my parakeet.”

Oops.

My bad.

Sometimes we know when we’ve made a mistake. Sometimes we don’t.

It’s the ones we don’t see that can really bite us.

The magazine mental_floss (March-April 2007) has a list of the 20 greatest mistakes in history. They include:

The mistake that burned down ...