Cases you caused

This is the biggest section here and nobody arrives at it voluntarily. That is worth saying plainly at the top rather than pretending otherwise.

It is not a section about being careless. Every case in it is something ordinary and sensible people do, usually while under a small amount of pressure, and every one of them produces a symptom that looks convincingly like somebody else caused it.

The seven

• You typed it out instead of copying it looks like a dead mirror
• You kept a link and never looked at it again looks like the market going away
• You took the address from wherever it appeared first looks like scammers
• You read it fast and answered the wrong thing looks like a difficult vendor
• You never made a key, and now nothing can be checked looks like unhelpful support
• You reused a name and linked yourself up looks like a breach
• You did it twice because nothing seemed to happen looks like double processing

What they have in common

Every one of them happens before the failure appears, sometimes a long time before. The typing happens before the page fails. The bookmark is saved months before it stops working. The key is not made in the years before it is needed. By the time anything looks wrong, the cause is old and out of sight.

That distance is why the blame lands elsewhere. A cause that happened five minutes ago is easy to connect. A cause that happened in March, on a laptop that has since been replaced, is not going to occur to anybody.

The pressure pattern

Four of the seven happen faster than deliberation. Something fails, and within a few seconds the reader has searched, chosen a source, copied a string or repeated an action. No thinking took place, and afterwards it will be described as a decision because that is how memory tidies things up.

This is why the fixes here are all rules set in advance rather than judgement applied in the moment. Judgement in the moment is exactly the thing that is not available when these happen.

On tone

None of this is a lecture about personal responsibility. The practical argument is narrower and it is about leverage. You are the only party in this whole arrangement whose behaviour you can change. Correct attribution to the market, the vendor or the network is interesting and mostly leaves you with nothing to do. Correct attribution here always leaves you with something to do, which is why it is worth looking at first even though nobody wants to.

The uncomfortable corollary is on the nobody section. A good share of what gets called bad luck turns out to belong on this page instead, and the sorting only goes one way.

Reading these without flinching

A page that names you as the cause is easy to read defensively, and defensive reading finds the sentence that does not quite apply and stops there. Every case here has an edge where it does not apply, because they all do.

The useful question when reading is not whether the description is exactly your situation. It is whether the mechanism is available to you at all. If a mechanism could have produced what you saw, it belongs on the list of candidates, and ruling it out takes about a minute in most of these.

Rule it out properly and you have lost a minute. Skip it because it felt accusatory and you may spend the evening on the wrong actor.

• How cases get assigned to an actor
• Every case in one table
• What a wrong attribution costs