How To Recover From A (Stupid) Mistake

Hey Edsters,

We've all done it. Mistakenly hanging up on someone important, copying the wrong document on the wrong paper, or missing an important dateline for our boss. Doing something wrong at work isn't a crime although it can feel the end of the world in the office. I have never been sure what the best approach to fixing an error is and this past week I was challenged with overcoming a minor mistake. 

How To Pick Yourself Up Off The Floor After Making A Big Mistake

Edsters!

Guess what happened after my long-winded rally cry for the benefits of freelancing last week? I met with that editor from the fashion blog and we laughed, swapped stories, drank water, and connected on all sorts of levels and then the bomb dropped: All their freelancers are unpaid.

Story of our lives, right? I mean, I’m definitely still taking the job anyways, but I guess money doesn’t start raining down once you upgrade from “intern” to “freelancer.” Oh well, I live and I learn.

But that is not the point of this post. The point of this post is that I’ve made some TERRIBLE mistakes at all of my internships and since we’re all rounding the halfway mark in the summer, that usually means the first (or, who am I kidding, the first ten) big uh-oh mistakes have happened at our prestigious places of work.

There are different levels to these transgressions. There’s the funny type, which aren’t so bad. Example: A girl at one of my fashion closet internships took a $40 pedi-cab ride back to the office after one of her first messenger runs because she was having trouble hailing a taxi.

Then there’s the are-they-going-to-fire-me type of mistakes. Recently, I reported on a fancy, celebrity-filled panel for a post at my internship, and I mis-quoted the founder of one of the brands represented. There’s nothing like getting a ‘Hey! You messed up!’ email from the PR director of the well-recognized women’s magazine that hosted the event at 9:30 pm on the day the post was published.