Don’t Let Stupid Mistakes Shake Your Confidence

The other day I got a call from a home inspector who was pretty upset with himself for having done “something really stupid.” What he had done was absent-mindedly turn on the air conditioning unit of a house he was inspecting on a day when the outside temperature was forty degrees.

It was the first time that the unit had been activated since the last warm day of the previous year and it had only been on a few seconds when the inspector realized his mistake and turned it off. However, when the inspector subsequently went outside to check the compressor, it was not functioning.

Now, the compressor was twenty-five years old which is about ten years beyond their normal life expectancy. So there’s no telling whether his mistake had anything to do with the compressor’s death.

He wanted to know what he should do. I asked him who it was that wanted him to do something.
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