This particular article is inspired by a friend of mine who, within a week of having met him, has made a few very human errors. I relate with the mistakes that he makes, yet I can't help but groan internally every time another one occurs.

The little slip-ups that my friend has had are a result of being a spontaneous, impulsive person, which is something I truly admire: the ability to flow through life without solid plans is a trait I don't have. Occasionally, I'll catch him before he does something impulsive and prevent him from doing it by asking simple questions.

The following are the examples:

First, the two of us had an event to attend. My friend said it was at a location twenty minutes away from where we started out; I trusted that he was correct, and walked with him for said amount of time, up and down hills and stairs through campus. When we arrived, we noticed that there weren't many people around. I asked him if he was sure that we were where the event was going to happen.

This resulted in him checking his phone to see if we were in the right place, and realizing that instead of going to the event's location (which was about a seven minute walk from where we'd originally started walking from), we'd gone way off the path.

If he'd thought it through and checked the location before we had left, we could've been spared the twenty minute walk and the intense thigh burn that I experienced as a result of walking a decent distance whilst wearing a skirt: which is something I should have considered not doing before we left.

Second, my friend asked me this morning if I was awake. I told him I was but I had no intention of getting up- my first class was scheduled to start four hours from that time and I was hoping to sleep a bit longer. He said, "okay," and left it at that.

He didn't elaborate.

I lay in my dorm room for a bit before it occurred to me that maybe he needed me to go do something with him, so I texted him to ask. Sure enough, he wanted to go into town to get a haircut so that he wouldn't end up putting it off until his hair looked shaggy and horrible. I agreed to join him.

He then posed the question of what my estimated time of arrival to the bus stop was.

I was getting ready to leave, and didn't check my phone for approximately sixty seconds. So of course he claimed, "never mind, I'll just come up to the dorms." Which seemed fine to me, when I checked my phone, since I hadn't known where he was while he texted me.

So he came to my room to meet up with me, and we trekked to the bus stop.

Where I then asked: "why not wait to get a haircut until your friend comes into town this weekend and we can go to the barber's with him?"

Which my friend, obviously, had not thought of before I asked.

Which meant that my friend had stood waiting at the bus stop, hiked back uphill to the dorms, and then crawled back to the bus stop to wait, ending up not needing to board a bus.

If only we were in the habit of thinking everything through, the small non-issues wouldn't even exist!