The story of how Vintage Capital Management, a private equity firm, “forgot” to send a letter that cost them $92.5MM makes YOUR story about what happened when you forgot the 2% organic milk sound petty and minuscule by comparison. Allow me to expound on this.

You’re at your weekly writer’s critique group reading, critiquing, making pithy comments, and you receive a text from your beloved.

“Can you please pick up some milk on the way home? We’re out. Thank you, sweetie.”

You read the text and dismiss it, well, because you were getting a critique on your latest literary masterpiece and that understandably consumes your entire bandwidth.

When you get home, your beloved asks, “Did you get the milk?”

[Seeing you empty handed, she does not use the nominative of address of “dumbass” because she is a Southern woman of considerable breeding and refinement. But, let’s admit it — she is tempted.]

“What milk?” you reply, as you slap your forehead, thereby dislodging and rebooting your brain.

Though it is ten in the PM and you desperately want to watch the latest Jack Ryan episode, you hop into your SUV, drive to the half-mile away, all-night grocery (listening to the Bruce Springsteen E Street Band Sirius channel), and pick up a gallon of two percent, organic milk. You do not buy any other kind of milk because in your household “milk” means two percent, organic.

That is what happens when you inadvertently “forget” to do something.

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