No ones outages. Yet how many people think about the errors made. You know those times when you leave a burner on, ATM card in the machine, original in the copier. OK who goes to the copier any more like they used to. But, that doesn't mean you are making errors all the time. Running data center infrastructure is so full of potential procedural errors the disciplined have figured out they need to invest in detecting and reducing errors.
Here is a paper written in 1995 on Working Memory, the short term memory you use to do process the new and old information. http://chil.rice.edu/byrne/Pubs/git-cogsci-95-06.pdf
“In their everyday interaction with the world, people often make mistakes, slips, lapses,
miscalculations and the like. Although making errors is common and the effects of errors can
range from the merely annoying to the catastrophic, procedural errors have received relatively
little attention from cognitive psychologists. Senders and Moray (1991, p. 2) suggest that “[o]ne
reason for this is that error is frequently considered only as a result or measure of some other
variable, and not as a phenomenon in its own right.” Typically, procedural errors are viewed as
the result of some stochastic function. Decrements in performance are manifested as an increase
in global error rate, with little or no attention paid to what causes any particular error.
This stochastic view of error does not seem to correspond to people’s intuitions about
their own behavior. People seem prone to making some kinds of errors more often than others,
and errors seem to occur more often at particular steps in the execution of a given procedure. In
some cases, errors are simply the result of systematic deficiencies or “bugs” in knowledge (e.g.
Brown & VanLehn, 1980). That the lack of correct knowledge of how to perform a step would
lead to errors on that step seems a plausible explanation of some kinds of error. However, this
explanation does not cover cases where people do have the correct knowledge. Many people
report making errors such as leaving the original document behind in a photocopier, failing to
retrieve one’s bank card from an automated teller machine (ATM), and forgetting to replace the
gas cap after filling the tank. In all these cases, people almost certainly have the knowledge
required to carry out the task, because they perform the task correctly most of the time. Yet
errors in these and other similar tasks are often reported. ”