Mistake reports

At Mistake Reports, people can anonymously describe a decision they made that didn't go as planned.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

DoctressJulia

Back when?
Promethean Sky

As if I didn’t already have enough internet addictions…
dculberson

I felt a great disturbance in my productivity, as if dozens of hours suddenly cried out in terror and were silenced.
thecheat

back then.

I’m surprised that a postal worker would do this themselves. I had the misfortune of having to send a laser printer Parcel Post with a prepaid amount of stamps that I had to apply myself to the box. Sheets and sheets of stamps. With the sticker stamps you have to peel each one by itself and apply it as opposed to the old gummed backs that you could just wet and slap on a whole bunch. I was in hell for a few minutes until it was done.

With that said, my local PO is a jingoistic dungeon. At some point they had everything done over in red, white, and blue paint and formica. But you couldn’t hide the late 70′s era brown and beige. Plus, the place was lit very poorly lending a terribly dreary feeling to the “Post office” side while the “PO Box” side was lit up and seemed to be much newer.
- travtastic
  
  I always look for the smaller offices. I need to ship frequently for my side business, and if I had to go to the main branch all the time I’d end up burning it down. It’s like they have some weird inverse rule about the number of open registers and the number of customers.
Lobster

How often does one have a mistake they enjoy?
- Pantograph
  
  Not often enough.
Anonymous

I love the super-dry, almost “scantron” aesthetic of the forms. It makes these personal (and frequently absurd+personal) inner-ramblings of strangers seem almost likeâ€¦a voyeuristic act. In a good way. â€¦Like the internet itself, come to think of it!
Joshua E K

Hey SamSam, I’m one of the designers of the site: You’re right, those handwritten forms are too realistic to be fonts! Those ones were filled out at parties or sent to us in the mail, then scanned in and composited onto the standard background.
Anonymous

Mistake #89511. That’s all.
mikeyg

LOL Went to the site and read some of these! They are frakin hilarious!
Lobster

Hrm. Lot of “artists” on that page who realized too late how they were acting. Better late than never, I guess.
Oskar

“Existential mistake”? Huh?

Did the mistake make you doubt your belief in higher powers or the existence of the human soul? That’s a big accomplishment for a post-office screw-up!
SamSam

The set-up is quite clever. I’m confused about how some of them are hand-written. Either that’s an amazingly realistic font, or some of these are scanned in.
penguinchris

Hmm, I read through all of them and was amused, but I think many of them missed the point of describing a mistake… most read more like a slightly elaborate FML entry than a genuine mistake. I mean, mistakes can be FML stories, but not all FML stories are mistakes, and not all the things on this site are really mistakes.
Church

I love that there was a “tl;dr” box even back then.