Imagine some other guy needs to work overtime because of a mistake you make. Therefore he was not there to see his wife having an affair with her best friend. Therefore the couple wouldn't have fought loudly and violently, prompting the neighbours to call the police, making them miss a burglary going on across town, where unfortunately a man would have been fatally shot... you know, all the stuff that tends to happen in soap operas.
Or imagine that a mistake, albeit a serious one (like one that might have caused incorrect invoices to be sent), was mitigated by another mistake (the mail server crashed). Then you can truly say, you've dodged a bullet.
Now to paraphrase Mel Gibson in Signs, you can look at it two ways... it could be a sign, evidence that someone is watching out for you. It was fate. Or it could be just pure luck. Apparently, if you see things in the latter way, faults are just tragic and absolutely needless, and this breeds fear. However if you see things as if mistakes were meant to be, it breeds hope. It gives certainty that in fact you are not at fault for mistakes.
Rather than taking either approach, I tend to believe the following: most mistakes do not occur because people are incompetent at their tasks, but because people do not get to the right place, at the right time, under the right circumstances. It is easy not to make mistakes when everything around you works perfectly, when everything is specifically dedicated to get this task done. However, even the best will drop a few, when all hell breaks loose.
It is only the truly great who can be flawless even in the most difficult of circumstances, because they can get to the most convenient places at the best possible moment. These are the people to whom the following quote from The Matrix applies:
Neo: What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets?
Morpheus: No, Neo. I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready, you won't have to.
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