having the Aviation Accident Investigations Autism™️ has actually done wonders for the way I process and respond to my own fuck-ups
And I don’t just mean “oh, my little work mistake is actually nothing compared to a fiery crash that kills people,” either. The reason commercial flight is so many orders of magnitude safer than any other form of transportation is because after every accident and incident, an independent regulatory body investigated it with the express goal of figuring out exactly what happened, why, and how to prevent the same thing from ever happening again—not to root out which person deserved the blame or the liability.
It’s a simple, shockingly effective idea. It’s also worlds away from how most people approach their own mistakes and the mistakes of others.
Because it’s never just one person’s fault. And even when it is, it still isn’t.
The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they’re tired or sick or stressed out, so there’s two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely.
Everyone eventually has a bad day. Every component breaks down. Every computer gets a bad a Windows update and spirals into a reboot doom loop. If it’s possible for one person’s mistake to domino into a mushroom cloud of a fuckup, then that task is too critical to be one person’s sole responsibility. The accident sequence starts with the design of the system—so how do you improve the system to keep it from happening again?
I think the purest form of love is just wanting someone to notice life with you. “taste this. look at that. hear this song.” again and again. until you can’t imagine noticing life without them.
More i Grow my body Stonger. More i Learn my head gets Longer. More i Eat my belly Bouncing… More i Fight my foes i’m Trouncing.
More i Sing my voice gets Louder… More i Boast my pride gets Prouder… More i Run my speed gets Upper… What about you Mother Fucker…
normally this is when people reblog posts like this and say something like “i was on so much painkillers when i made this” but that doesn’t apply here. i was completely lucid when i made this. i can remember writing this phenomenal post with crystal clarity. for me, it was typical. i could do this kind of thing every day if i wished to.
