Spending Other People's Time

I screwed up today.

In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't a big deal, but my screw-up cost someone else time. And time is money, frustration, distraction from other tasks, and all of that.

Someone from another work area needed some help and wanted to use some code I had already written. So we debugged the application to figure out what was needed and then I provided the appropriate code to plug into their application. The work on their end should have taken five minutes or so. But the developer just came back to me saying he was having problems, so I went to help him debug his application. As it turns out, I forgot to paste in a necessary function when I emailed the code earlier today. So he spent about an hour trying things in code he was unfamiliar with, wondering if there were other problems, and generally wasting time. His time.

It's a lesson in completeness and attention to detail.