I just read a great book by Joseph T. Hallinan – “Why We Make Mistakes”. This book explains scientifically what I, as your sometimes enabler, often try to reinforce: You were not designed to be perfect!

The author supplies plenty of evidence that shows that your brain actually functions in ways that not only make it easy to make certain mistakes, but, in fact, makes it more likely that you will.

For one thing, your brain likes the gist of things and sometimes eschews those pesky details. If the brain senses it is unlikely to find something wrong odds are it won’t. It’s called a quitting threshold. One of the examples given is the work of the airport baggage screeners, who of course don’t expect to find something in the vast majority of cases. But this is the kind of situation where the quitting threshold kicks in. The author quotes tests that showed screeners at LAX missed 75 percent of the bomb materials hidden by undercover agents. Subject to the same type of quitting threshold, it is doubtful that the new electronic “strip search” machines will yield much better results.

Just because I have absolved you of the pressure of being perfect doesn’t mean we can’t help our poor defective brains along. That is why it is important that processes, systems and products are designed to help us avoid making errors.

One problem I had was the bank’s fondness of making my debit card the same color as my credit card. I kept incurring fees for doing cash withdrawals on the credit card instead of the debit card. I came up with a few ways to help avoid making this mistake:

• Mark the cards boldly with a Sharpie pen
• Ask the bank to disable the credit card cash advance feature
• Give the cards different pin numbers  so the action is less automatic (of course remembering them presents another challenge!)

Now why couldn’t the banks anticipate this problem and make the cards significantly different? Perhaps they DID anticipate it and decided they would rather gain from all the fees they would collect from hapless users!

P.S. Computers aren’t without error either. My grammar checker just tried to get me to change the word your in the second line to you’re. I fought it and I won.