It's amazing how being an incompetent gibbon can work out in your favour.

Yesterday I broke the Gallery's networking. I had logged in to their firewall remotely in order to fiddle with VPN-related stuff, and I managed to hose their outgoing network connectivity to the point where I couldn't log back in to start it up again. So when I got home from work I phoned the Gallery, got through to lzz, apologised for being a buffoon, and offered to come round and fix it. She was delighted, because she'd assumed it to be an NTL problem which would take them days to sort out. So the net effect was that I got to see Liz (which I wouldn't have otherwise since she was too busy to go to the Calling), and furthermore she was effusively grateful.

It's not just her, either. When we had the PuTTY security hole last month, not one person wrote to us to complain, and lots of people wrote to thank us for our prompt response; in fact our steady trickle of small donations from random grateful users took a major spike on that day.

I know that everybody's human, and humans all make mistakes, and the occasional mistake is to be tolerated if it's fixed promptly. I can understand merely not blaming me; that's fair enough. But it does strike me as downright odd that incidents like the above would seem to be giving people an incentive to make mistakes (provided they fix them promptly, of course); it doesn't seem to me to bode well for the human race.