Not to get this going again, but the mistake was not the problem. What was interesting was the acceptance of such a conclusion, which was ludicrous on its face. It shouldn't have passed the sniff test, yet that narrative is so deeply drilled into some heads here that they couldn't recognize how absurd it was.
I was thinking about this in the light of something daft that happened on Saturday, the day after Thermal posted. I had volunteered to print out some music for choir practice on Sunday. I asked the choirmaster if I should get some 100 g/m
2 paper, as I had noticed that the 80 g/m
2 paper I have seemed flimsy for the purpose on a previous occasion. He emailed back to say he had plenty of the heavier weight, so I went to his house to collect it.
As his wife was giving me tea he said, three sheets each? I said no, four. Does it have to be four, said he, because it's only six pages of music? I said yes, because of a page turn, also because the translation of the text was printed (separately) on the back page, making it actually seven pages in all. He conceded the point. I should point out that he asked for 30 copies, our choir isn't large, and he regularly prints out works with more pages than this one. (I think the Mozart
Te Deum runs to nearly 30 pages per copy!) I was thinking this was a strange objection, given the amount of music he regularly prints out with the same or more pages, but I was drinking tea and chatting to his wife and not really calculating it.
I had hoped to get a whole packet of the stuff, so that I had some to hand if extra copies of anything were needed, and hoped that he wouldn't parsimoniously count out the number and just give me enough to do the job. When he handed me
two packets of the stuff, saying "I think that should be enough", I was certainly startled, but wasn't motivated to question it. I mean, he prints stuff out for the choir all the time, and he knows how thick the bundle of paper he carries to the hall is. An 8-page, 4-sheet Christmas carol is a bagatelle. Not two full packets of paper!
I went home and started printing. 30 copies, four sheets each, that's 120 sheets. Subjectively, I'd barely used a quarter of the first packet. I looked to see how many sheets were in the packet, but weirdly, it didn't say. Only a large
100 g/m2 on the front. I began to see what had happened. I checked my own packets of 80 g/m2, which were subjectively about 20% thinner, and these said 500 sheets. Figures. These were 500-sheet packets. Sir had just looked at the front, seen the number 100, and done his sums on the basis that this was the number of sheets in the packet.
My point is that handing me two packets of paper was a ludicrous thing to do which shouldn't have passed any sniff test at all, least of all that performed by someone who himself prints out this sort of thing all the time. But he did it. (He's a retired professor of physics, I don't know if that makes it better or worse.) And I went along with it - although I had my reasons for not delving too deeply - without actually getting as far as thinking, he's giving me eight times as much paper as I need.
When I emailed him to ask if I should return the surplus paper (and he replied just keep it for later use, RESULT!) he confirmed that he'd just looked at the number 100 and calculated on the assumption that that was the number of sheets in the packet. Despite obviously knowing better from using the stuff for decades, and the fact that the entire reason for my visit was to get paper that was specifically 100 g/m2.
It happens. People don't always cycle things through their brains the way they should. And an apology with a laugh should be accepted.