One of the things that I noticed while I was working in a corporate office is that Murphy's Law is applicable in everything that you do, so you should not expect it to be extraordinary.

So what is Murphy's Law?
Murphy's Law states that;

"Anything that can go wrong, will go Wrong"

And it is quite true, and there are several times when we feel embarrassed because of something that we would have done. Here I am going to share a similar experience that will show you how things can go wrong.

Well, the story starts when I was working in a corporate structure with an organization just like any IT firm, and I was working on developing an application that would automate several of the tasks that the client used to do manually.

It was a complex code with several conditions and situations embedded in the same that made it possible for the automation to run.

We took more than 100 hours to build the application, and then I asked my Manager to check if everything is working fine and as per requirements. The day went well and we didn't find any issue in the code and so we were ready to provide a demo to the client, so my manager requested some time next week to show the demo.

Meanwhile, I kept on working on the other requirements.

I kept the application open in the background so that I am always ready to show the demo. Then the day arrived when we all were ready to show the demo of the application that we had built.

5 minutes before the meeting I ran the application to check if it is working properly, and guess what - It started giving me all sorts of errors.

The meeting was going to start at 4 PM and I was struggling with finding out the error at 3:57 PM. 

It was so bad that even at 4 PM, I asked my manager to give me more than 2 or 3 minutes as my network was bad. I was struggling and knew that there is a bug in the application that cannot be solved right now.

So at 4:05 PM I joined the call and told apologized that I wasted their time as I had this bug that came in the code from somewhere that I can't understand.

Although there were only a few managers and no directors of the client company, still it was embarrassing as I was prepared and still tumbled down the ladder.

I asked the team to give me 10 or 15 so minutes and that I will be able to resolve this issue as it was working fine and I haven't made any such changes that it should not work, and one of them asked me to take time. It was not because they genuinely wanted me to take more time, but because they thought we haven't made the application correctly and we are going to charge them more time as we charge our clients on an hourly basis.

Having said that, I dropped the call and worked on the code, checked again and again, and felt miserable as I really wanted to show that we have completed the work beforehand and wanted to make my Manager proud, but still, I was not able to find the issue.

I tried rewriting the codes and started working on the code segment by segment, and even tried to restore the previous versions, which was obviously of no use.

Then after 30 minutes or so, I saw one drop-down box on my application that was showing a different function, and I required a totally different function to run the application. This happened because I was running my client's application on the wrong function. Actually, it wasn't wrong but a careless mistake on my side that I didn't see the drop-down menu before running the code to confirm the function.

After I selected the correct function and ran the application, it worked perfectly fine. This was the time that I took a long breath and contacted my manager and the client asking them some time to revisit the demo.

Adding to the misery, the client was also busy with other meetings by that time and I had to wait more than 1 hour to get their schedule.

After connecting I got to know that the clients are busy for more than 2 hours, so I had to schedule the meeting for 8 PM.

This was quite embarrassing as this is not something I personally like, and I had this habit of getting things right the first time, so when this happened  I was really ashamed of what had happened and wanted to correct it asap.

But there is one thing that mistakes teach us, and that is we should not be sure that things will work out absolutely as we think they will be, and that we should always be ready for any kind of discrepancies.

One more thing, we should not lose heart or become depressed when something like this happens to us because the world is not going to end just because that application was not working, we can definitely search for some time and reschedule another meeting, and there is no one with a perfect schedule.

Emergencies come like this only. Suddenly. That's why these are called as Emergencies.

And we should not be afraid of these things because you are not defeated if you fail at a particular task, but you get defeated when you stop trying.

What are the takeaways of this story?
Nothing is going to last forever. Today what you think was embarrassing will be a comic moment of your life and life goes on no matter how much struggle you face.

The second most important thing to remember is that no one is going to remember you for what you did but they will always remember you and how you made them feel, and this is true. You can take my example itself, after I gave the demo in the evening, the Managers were happy and the Client really appreciated the work that I had delivered so far.

When I look back at that moment that obviously reminds me of the horrors of embarrassment but that also reminds me that I stood up and worked to resolve the issues and never gave up.

Situations like these occur in your life and this is the time when you should wake up and start working hard on yourself. You should not feel defeated and try to correct things if something has gone wrong, but you should also remember that life is like this only, you will get a lot of rainy days, and it will be on you if you want to be happy and enjoy the weather or would you like to sleep all day frowning upon the darkness that it may bring with itself.