Failure as an Option

It has often been said that failure is not an option, usually in movies and television shows. In fact, it has been said so often that it is a cliche, or soon will be. (At this point, it would not surprise me if someone has made a supercut of people stating that failure is not an option.) I would argue that this is false; failure is always an option, just not a very appealing one. Indeed, sometimes failure is the only option. Whether it be due to poor planning, ill preparation, or a system rigged against you, there will be times that succeeding in something simply is not possible.

At work, earlier this week, I had a front row seat to a system failure. I was at the end of sorting line and was responsible for pulling off the packages meant for specific aisles. Unofficially, I was also to remove any items that made it to the end but were unpicked (either the pickers had missed them, or these packages had been sent to the wrong end of the facility). However, while things started out smoothly enough, they quickly took a turn for the worse.

Due to certain pickers being inexperienced, all pickers being so spread out, and a drive to process a great many packages...well, errors were made. The end of the line became heavily congested with packages, both those that should have been picked earlier (but weren't), and those that should have been sent to the other end of the facility (but weren't). It was...overwhelming, and I do not mean that figuratively. For every one package that was meant for the end aisles, there were AT LEAST nine or ten that weren't supposed to be there. There were so many packages that stuff began falling off the conveyor line, simply because there was no room left for any of it.

And I just stood there and watched. There was just too much. Even if I were to work in a desperate, frenzied manner, I would not have been able to clear it all away. (Not to mention that I would have exhausted myself well before the end of our shift.) Some people were sent over specifically to handle removing the heap of packages, and the matter was dealt with, but that it happened at all was unsettling, and to bear witness to it, even more so.