Does everyone make dumb mistakes

@FlaSwampRat

A couple of years ago, I had a similar incident happen to me.

I had gone in to a drop-and-hook location, dropped the loaded one, hooked the empty, closed the doors, and went to the guard shack so they could look in the back to make sure it's empty. They did and apparently, I didn't put the latch down over the handle after I shut it because 6 miles later, I stopped at a red light and something caught my eye in the right mirror. It was the right door on the trailer swinging around to bang in to the side of the trailer!!!! In a minute or less, the light went green and I quickly pulled through the intersection and immediately onto a wide section of the shoulder of the road. I was hoping no one saw that, but since there were 5 or 6 cars behind me, I'm 100% sure all of them were saying what a dumb, stupid, driver I was and how I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing. You know what? They would be right in saying that, because I was guilty.

I've thought about that incident several times since then, trying to figure out how that happened. The only 2 logical conclusions I can draw are without the latch covering the handle, I hit a bump and the handle bounced out OR I didn't bother completely closing the door after security checked it. I'm going to go with option one, but deep down, I think it was probably getting in a hurry and not completely closing that door.

From that point on, I have locked every trailer I pull, even the empty ones, to make sure that won't happen again.

From a moderator standpoint, I've made a few boneheaded mistakes as a staff member. Most of them y'all don't see and are fixed easily enough, but there have been a couple that have had the senior staff going

The point of all of that is simply this. If you do a task long enough, it's easy to get complacent and that's when a mistake will happen, OR if you are new at doing something, you are bound to make a mistake because it's unfamiliar to you. Either way, when the mistakes happen, give yourself a good and fair AAR (After Action Review) and figure out how to keep it from happening the next time.