When I was in Army, I was assigned to the Signal Corps. The main part of my job was to set up and maintain tactical communications systems that connected air defense artillery batteries. It was a fun and challenging period of my life. But as with most things technical, things can often go wrong.

The term OHS was used to describe a situation when something didn’t work because of something the responsible person did wrong. For example, I might complain to my commander that I couldn’t make a radio connection with the team from Charlie Company. After coming into my radio van, he quickly realized that I was tuned to the wrong frequency. He would point out my mistake and say it was another case of “OHS.” OHS stands for Operator Head Space. The problem is between the operator’s ears.

The military is famous for such phrases. I remember a similar one which described basically the same description when I was in basic training. For some reason, I couldn’t reassemble my M16 rifle after cleaning it one day. Upon inspecting it, he noticed that I’d left a piece of the cleaning rod in the recoil spring tube. He told me that I’d suffered from a brain-fart and need to drop and give him 50 push-ups.

Both of these memories came into fresh focus while I was beginning to look over everyone’s blogs yesterday. I wanted to work in a time saving and efficient manner so I set up a new Google spreadsheet to record everyone’s blog URL with a space for my score and comments. I thought it would be better to have everything in one place considering there are so windows to open and close.

As I began the task, I checked everyone’s Feedback forms for the weekly blog URL. It seemed odd that there were so few URLs posted there. After spending nearly an hour going through each Feedback form and making of a note who did and didn’t have a URL, I realized that 40 students didn’t have URLs on the Feedback form. I should have realized then something was wrong with my system.

I then tweeted my findings with a semi-stern message:

Fortunately, @carroll_tuj quickly added her URL to the her Feedback document with a note that she’d previously posted it to the Accounts document. After quickly checking the Accounts document, I realized I’d blown it. I then tweeted an apology for my brain-fart.

So much for trying to save time.

My hope now is to score all of your blogs and write comments by the end of the weekend. I will do my best to comment only on the blogs, though in some cases I will provide additional comments on the Feedback document.

Again, please accept my apologies for this screw-up. The fault is all mine and I feel bad for any confusion or hurt feelings caused.

Are we okay now?

Image: Stack of US Army Signal Corp transmitter units by nsub1 through CC licensing.