We Can All Make A Mistake...

It's what you do next that really counts...

If you are a parent blogger in the UK (and even if you aren't) you may have spotted a blunder or two recently. In the past week there have been 3 pretty amazing faux pas from 3 of the biggest websites who work regularly with bloggers. And that's just to my knowledge...

Thing is, no-one is immune. You can only make decisions to the best of your ability at the time. The first week back after the Christmas holidays is manic, and none of us are at our best. Even nature spends half the day telling us we should still be in bed, and without the invention of the lightbulb we probably would be (which helps account for the huge families back then).

When you are busy and working it's easy to press the wrong button or type the wrong word, or even worse, leave half a draft and publish by accident. Gary the cat once published a post while I was on the loo. It was rubbish, but it had 3 viewers and a comment within 5 minutes because he added an intriguing title.

When you are at an event and trying to wrangle kids, partners, PR's, event staff, having fun AND sharing to social media, it's stunning more of us don't end up with Instagram story videos from inside pockets, or accidental shares of the venue's bathroom floor.

When you take photos, you are often in a position that seems normal and acceptable to everyone around you, and you can very easily end up with your toddler in their underpants in the background, or a big pack of condoms on the worktop (that was in a video promoting cooking with kids about 7 years ago).

A brand once excitedly posted a photograph to Facebook of a review parcel they were sending to me. It looked great, but it also showed my full address to their thousands of followers. Thankfully I'm not the sort of blogger who has many stalkers. They were utterly mortified when someone told them.

When we do research we can all be caught out. We can all misunderstand what we're reading and end up with the wrong end of the stick, or we can place trust in a website or person we shouldn't have done. I've seen polyester described as 'plastic-free' when it's an actual type of plastic, and someone who confidently explained headlice are invisible to the naked eye. I've got photos and videos of headlice on this blog, and in 26 years of parenting I've never had any trouble seeing them. Sadly.

When you write, you write from your own perspective and experience, but that may be very different for someone else. I avoid talking about other cultures whenever possible, because I know that I don't know enough, and it terrifies me that I'll offend someone accidentally. It's probably happened many times, but people have been too polite or nice to tell me.

I did add entirely the wrong name to a book review once and really offend someone. He commented AND emailed his complaints, which would have been much more understandable if it had been his book...

We've all emailed the wrong person, pressed reply when we want somebody entirely different, or failed to BCC. Just don't do it again. Learn. Or at least don't do it again until everyone forgot the first one, or you'll get shouted at and laughed at equally. Really though, if they shout, they're probably overly-confident about their own ability to mess things up, and if they laugh, that's just relief it's not their turn.

We're humans, we make mistakes, but it's not so much the error, it's what you do afterwards that really matters...