It might be the alignment of the planets, but there’s been a lot of "whoops!" going on lately. The Montana Power Co. sent the Radella family of Roscoe an electric bill for $50 billion instead of the $35.95 it should have. "Whoops!" Someone at Lockheed confused metric with English measurements and caused a $125 million Mars spacecraft to rendezvous a little too close to the planet. Like right into the surface. "Whoops!"

     On the face of it, it would appear that the power bill was the bigger mistake since it was for 400 times as much. And it would have been had the Radellas paid it, meaning the power company could act like a typical lottery winner and squander it on double-wides for everyone in the family. But they didn’t. Coming from Montana they did what anyone else in the state would do under the circumstances: they holed up in a cabin with a small arsenal and dared the power company to make them pay up.

     Luckily, most mistakes don’t have such dire consequences. This is a good thing since it would really suck if people could get radiation poisoning just by putting too much bleach in the washer, or lose a spacecraft because they forgot to enter a check in the check register. I already have enough white patches on my jeans, I don’t need them on my skin too.

     The Army recently discovered they made a mistake and tried to fix it. They realized that, as we enter the new millennium (a phrase I have to use because it’s required by law to be inserted into every column), Trained Killer just isn’t as high on peoples’ list of career choices as it used to be. Thus, they found themselves 6,300 recruits short this year. To remedy it they offered a bonus of $6,000 to anyone who enlisted. This was is in addition to other bonuses, scholarships, and all-expense paid trips to exotic locales like Kosovo and East Timor.

     This sets a good example, since trying to correct your mistakes is good for the soul. To a point, anyway. You have to wonder about the 25,000 dog owners who had their pets neutered, then realizing the error of their ways had Neuticles, artificial testicles, implanted in place of the real ones. Apparently their dogs are more fixed than most.

     Some people just won’t ever learn. Look at the new TV season. Look at the movies in production like "Charlie’s Angels", "Starsky and Hutch", and "The Courtship of Eddie’s Father." Look at the thousands of people on the east coast who said "whoops!" when their beachfront vacation homes slid into the ocean thanks to Hurricane Floyd. Sam Kineson is probably in heaven right now screaming, "Why do you build houses on the beach when you know they get wiped away by a hurricane every other year?!?" Probably for the same reason people rebuild their houses in a flood plain so it will get washed away a few years later.