There are no Accidents
A big pet peeve of mine is when people refer to things that occur as an accident. Referring to something as an accident takes away ownership of the event that took place, it is essentially saying that no one is to blame, no one is at fault, and some mysterious force is responsible for the outcome. I hate to break it to you, there is no such thing as an accident, not even your little brother is an accident, despite what your parents may tell him (ps, I have a special place in my heart for people like you, and it isn’t a good place for you to be).
Why is it when a plane crashes we don’t call it an accident, or when a train derails we do the same? It is because neither of these events is truly an accident, and yet we refer to car crashes as accidents as a way to shift blame from ourselves and our own actions to those outside of our control. Just think of a child who breaks something. The parent scolds the child, and the child full of tears and cries screams out “It was an accident!”, somehow trying to shift blame from them to avoid the punishment that with surely follow. Parents understand this, and while they may agree that the action of their child was unintended more often than not the child will still receive some sort of punishment from as mild as a scolding up to taking away privileges temporarily.
Let’s look at some examples of preventable incidents we refer to as accidents:
- Car Crash — A car crash is usually caused by one of two things happening: a mechanical failure or driver error, both of which are caused by human error.
- Sliding on Ice — If your car slides on ice and that causes a crash, then the driver was not driving properly for the road conditions or didn’t have proper tires for the climate they were driving
- Brake Failure — Regular vehicle maintenance and servicing would identify looming problems before they occur. This is why in Manitoba vehicles must have a safety check within the last 2 years prior to sale, its to ensure the safety equipment is up to par
- Slamming on your brakes and getting rear-ended — In this case at least two people are to blame. The driver who slammed on their brakes and the person who rear-ended them. The person who slammed on their breaks was most likely following too close to the car in front of them, reducing their reaction time. The driver who rear-ended was doing the same.
- Oopsie Babies — Every time you have sex you are knowingly taking a risk that a pregnancy will occur. Whether you use a condom or other birth control systems you do so with the knowledge that neither is 100% effective unless you have had your plumbing physically disconnected. While humans are one of a few species that have sex for fun, the purpose of sex is simple — to reproduce. If you have an unplanned baby it is just that, unplanned but not an accident. Both humans involved we responsible for the actions they took and the outcome of those actions. And for any of you parents who tell your kids they were accidents, I have some words for you and you won’t like it.
- A child knocking over a glass of juice — While the child did not intend to knock over the glass, the glass was ultimately knocked over due to careless actions. The glass may have been too full or too heavy, the child may have picked it up with one hand instead of two which makes it the responsibility of the parent, or through play may have knocked it over with a toy or their own body which makes it the responsibility of the child. The actions they took or didn’t take were directly responsible for the glass of juice falling over.
- Slip and Fall in a parking lot — It happens, it hurts and we’ve all done it. While walking through a parking lot, we’ve slipped and fell, twisted our leg and otherwise hurt ourselves. But this too was no accident. The property owner could have taken greater care in using a treatment for their slippery parking lot. You could have taken precautions by wearing proper footwear that is designed for walking on ice or slippery surfaces. Unless you are a curler, chances are your ability to walk on ice with near zero grips on your shoes is minimal.
Talking about unintended consequences is all about perception and context. When something bad happens to a person we refer to it as an accident. We also refer to it as an accident if a person caused unintended consequences to another person, but the tone changes when we refer to harm caused by companies. When a company causes harm to another company, an individual or group of people we rarely refer to it as an accident. Let’s look at some examples
- Amazon Nukes the Internet — In February 2017, an Amazon employee was doing maintenance on some of their systems, and when typing the command into the system made an error and inadvertently removed a large number of servers from the network causing a chain reaction effect that knocked Amazon S3 offline. In their post-mortem, not once did they describe the issue as an accident. It was an unplanned event. They even owned up to it and explained exactly what had happened and why. It was not an accident but human error.
- Equifax Gets Hacked — In May 2017, the credit reporting agency, Equifax, suffered a major data breach that exposed personal information for almost half of the US population. The cause of the breach was an unpatched web application that had a software update released 2 months prior to prevent this type of attack from happening. No one would call this an accident, but we’d call it negligence because the company had known about it, had the resources to fix it but did not for one reason or another.
Language evolves. The definition of “accident” is quite clear…
An accident, also known as an unintentional injury, is an undesirable, incidental, and unplanned event that could have been prevented had circumstances leading up to the accident been recognized, and acted upon, prior to its occurrence.
-Wikipedia
And the Oxford Dictionary defines an accident as…
An event that happens by chance or that is without apparent or deliberate cause.
We can all think of words that are used in a way that no longer matches the original intent. Because the way we use words change their meaning also changes, and this is where I have a problem with the word “accident”.
When we use words like accident we minimize the ownership of the incident the person or company has caused, whether directly or indirectly. We all make mistakes, whether conscious or unconscious because we are all human. I can’t count on two hands the number of mistakes I make in a week whether personal or professional. Being a responsible person means owning up to your mistakes, admitting what went wrong and talking through how to prevent it from happening again.
I encourage you to banish the word accident from your vocabulary and start using words like incident or unplanned event. Let’s hold people accountable for their actions to minimize incidents and more importantly, help people grow.
