Means keeping your eye on the ball, watching what you and others are doing. Being alert about the overview, the big picture. That’s oversight. It’s what we do when we are caring for a loved one whose unpredictable actions might cause harm to themselves or someone else. It’s what you do when you are a carer for a partner living with Alzheimer’s; when you need to be full-time-eyes-open for behaviour or actions that could hurt.

But there is another sort of oversight: the one that results when we fail to do something – or do it wrongly. That kind of oversight is usually forgivable: a lapse with little or no consequence. It can happen when we fail to notice something or some action. Most often we can shrug it off, no harm done.

But every now and then an oversight, despite our best intentions, can have unintended consequences, especially at a personal level. It can be embarrassing or may inadvertently disclose confidential information. It can be as simple as asking an inappropriate question or making an unguarded comment at the wrong time or, indeed, at any time. And I’m not immune to such indiscretions, despite my best efforts. Does that sound familiar? Am I alone?

Such an oversight (or really, lack of care) happened to me recently and caused me and an email recipient a high degree of embarrassment and stress. Using ‘Reply’ I included a lengthy epistle about my recent travels, then carelessly (for convenience!) added a raft of family names as cc’s to my reply. That would have been fine had I initiated the first email. But now the string of earlier, confidential, messages from the original writer was all still there. My lengthy text had simply pushed the original messages out of sight down the screen, for all to see!

A few seconds after I hit that ‘Send’ button there was no going back! I had, however unintentionally, exposed to others who had no right to know, the confidential information my friend had sent me. I was devastated. Too late. The damage done, and my immediate heartfelt apology has not healed that breach. My careless use of ‘cc’ now remains with me, and my remorse will continue.

I do hope my readers will learn from that experience and think carefully before sending inappropriate email copies of replies to others not included earlier!

Today’s lesson to self: When I write these epistles, I write once and read thrice before posting. But with personal emails from now onwards, I now do the same and only hit ‘Send’ after I check that the contents are appropriate to recipients!

I’ll try to keep an oversight and avoid oversights…..