If you picked up the Aug. 7 edition of the Merritt Herald, you may have noticed a glitch in the sports section.

That glitch was the repetition of two pages of sports news which had previously appeared in the July 31 edition of this newspaper.

We are sorry for the error. Believe me, with all the hard work we do here at our small office in Merritt — poring over facts and figures, checking and re-checking spellings of names, editing for clarity, conforming to Canadian Press style, and the list goes on — we hate to see a mistake make it to print.

However, as anyone alive can tell you, mistakes are inevitable.

The darnedest thing about a mistake in a newspaper, though, is it can’t be changed once it’s printed.

And as much as it sticks on our page, it sticks in our heads approximately 100 times longer.

So, if you flip over to today’s Herald Sports section, you’ll find an extra pair of pages to accommodate all the sports news that’s ready to go.

The inevitability of mistakes is not a pleasant reality to face, but it just has to happen every once in a while.

Sometimes the machine is well-oiled, and other times, well, the gears grind. It’s just the universe’s way of keeping us humble, I suppose.

While I’m on the topic of glitches, a major one has cropped up in Saskatchewan in its quest to change SaskPower users to smart meters.

The Saskatchewan government ordered its Crown corporation power utility to remove 105,000 smart meters from homes last week after eight unexplained fires.

In each case, the fire destroyed the smart meter but thankfully did not spread to the homes to which they were attached.

The concern is such that the city of Medicine Hat, Alta. has actually halted its smart meter replacement program.

The fires are all linked to one brand of meter, and of course the company that makes them said in a statement the cause of the fires isn’t known for sure and the fires may not have originated in the smart meters at all.

While the local fight against smart meter installation has been quiet lately, that doesn’t mean it’s over — especially with the heat these unexplained fires bring to the topic.

The situation in Saskatchewan has sparked concerns from people having smart meters installed across Canada. BC Hydro must have heard the news, because it promptly issued a statement reading “there is no evidence that a smart meter has ever been the cause of a fire in British Columbia.”

BC Hydro was also quick to point out it uses smart meters made by a different manufacturer than the ones installed — and now uninstalled — by SaskPower.

While I am not one to fan the flames of fear that each and every one of the 1.9 million smart meters BC Hydro has installed so far is a ticking firebomb, I am also not a fan of unexplained fires.

When there’s room for error — human or mechanical — once in a while, it’s going to happen.