Call me a cockeyed optimist, but it just seems to me that Carlos Ibañez is onto something. Carlos is a rental operator in Chile who has been putting his own rental operations inside a chain of large building-supply centers called Sodimac. In November, I went down to have a look. I was curious about how this worked - and whether it could be applied effectively in the United States. That re-mains to be seen - but if so, the potential is enormous. Meanwhile, I can report that it's working great in Chile.

Mistakes. There were two errors (that we know of, anyway) in the January issue - one technical, the other just sloppy. The technical one still baffles me: how Frank Wilson's hair turned green in the cover photo. Of course, the wags came out of hiding quickly. "Very, uh, Christmasy, with the red shirt," said one. It is a given that if you print 18,000 copies of a magazine with green hair on the cover, it will be the cover with the new A.R.A. president and it will be the biggest issue you ever produced - 173 pages that looked OK, one that didn't. It has something to do with the way our graphic-imaging program processes color, as I get it, in my feeble way of understanding things electronic, but there it is, nevertheless: greenish hair on Frank Wilson - who, by the way, laughed and took some sense of distinction at being the first A.R.A. president so adorned. God bless you, Frank, you are a sport.

The sloppy one was my own doing. I identified a Skyjack lift as a Mayville lift in a caption in Dan Vnuk's Counter & Yard Management article. You can't see detail in a scanned image on the screen, so to be sure you have to go back to the original photo - which, to save time, and being sure it was a MEC, I didn't.

Now, some may conclude that I have finally lost it, putting to rest a great deal of speculation among friends and colleagues for years. I could promise to go forth and sin no more, but that would be foolhardy, because the fact is, you can't be in this business if you can't bear the thought of a mistake - it is an absolute certainty that one is going to come along from time to time. But you have no business being in this business if you don't hate them. This business, just like yours, is built on trust, and you just don't mess around with trust. Mistakes threaten trust. We hate mistakes. We have no tolerance for them. Sure, we'll make more of them - but we'll hate it when we do.

I have been looking for a lesson in all this that applies as much to renting equipment as it does to publishing magazines, and of course, it's obvious: you can't be in any business if you're so fretful of mistakes that you sit still and do nothing. So I'm sure some of you are nodding in agreement and wincing over a memory or two that this little note calls to mind. I still feel my ears getting red when I recall one I made when I was 18, in my first newspaper job. But you won't stay in business long if you just shrug and accept mistakes, either.