We all make mistakes. How we prepare to avoid making errors, how we deal the repercussions of the ones happen anyway, and how we decide when to forgive those who screw up, are a large part of our personal lives and our larger culture. Part of that is how people react when they make blunders of their own. When celebrities, politicians, or giant corporations, make mistakes, they’re often writ large, and require big, splashy apologies to keep the money people happy.
Private individuals have more freedom, generally because their mistakes are often small-time, at best. On the domestic level, and when dealing with errors that result in nothing more than a minor inconvenience, a person has a lot of options when it comes to admitting fault. They could deny everything, or cover their tracks—thus the world will never know which family member left the toilet seat up, or tracked mud into the kitchen. Or, they could own up—knowing that the consequences will be light, or last only a short while. The most irritating response, however, is when a big, flashy admission of fault is brought to bear on the tiniest of offenses.
This usually has to do with the fact that the person making such a big deal about making a mistake is attempting to do it in such a self-aggrandizing way. “There’s no doubt about it, yup I made a mistake. I can admit when I’m wrong, you know—when I blow it, I’m not going to try to make excuses. I did it, and there’s no getting around it, yes indeed.” Yes, a Foghorn Leghorn rant is surely the appropriate response to forgetting to change the toilet paper roll and you certainly deserve a cookie for being so honest about your blunder!
There’s a particular personality type that seems especially prone to the occasional bombastic admission of meager mistakes. These folks tend to live in a constant, rotating circle of blame; a place where things keep going wrong all the time, and it’s always somebody’s fault, and it’s their job to remind those idiots that they really need to do better, next time.
When one of these Blamer makes a huge mistake, they desperately fling the responsibility outward. But of course, they know that nobody’s perfect, they know that a person who never seems to be responsible for anything that’s gone wrong is suspicious—and, of course they’re also highly motivated to prove that they’re not the sort of person who is always looking for scapegoats.
So, it becomes vitally important for them to prove that they can take responsibility for their own mistakes. Which is why they latch on to low-cost errors that nobody really cares about, and why they make such a huge deal about them, because–wow! If that’s how he reacts when he forgets to unload the dishwasher, imagine how sorry he’d be if he did something really bad!
The thing is though, the kind of person who owns up to tiny mistakes in such a grandiose way is a lot like the guy who does the least work when helping someone move: “You guys grab that sofa—don’t worry, I’ll get those cushions for you!” Instead of always somehow managing to avoid the heaviest physical burdens, the Blamer always manages to avoid the weightiest part of the responsibility when something goes wrong.
That’s not the problem, though.
The problem is that the Blamer only does the big-deal owning up in order to justify their efforts to assign blame to others, to find fault with others, to nail down once and for all why their plans are always failing, why their desires are always frustrated, and why they can’t seem to get anything important done. And things never ever just happen by themselves, in the Blamer’s world. There’s no such thing as an unavoidable error. They are the Quincy, M.E.’s of personal interactions: It’s never an accident—it’s always murder. In the confines of a private home, this kind of personality-type is destructive enough; but, in an office setting, people’s livelihoods are at stake.
So, let the grandiose mea culpa over nothing serve as a warning. If you encounter someone who makes a big deal about their own little mistakes, do yourself a favor and keep your distance.
