Last week, my wife was stung by a scorpion. It was a bark scorpion, a small critter with venom that packs a wallop. It’s the only species of scorpion whose venom can be lethal. Lea’s fine now, but the pain scorpions inflict is inversely proportional to their size.

We’ve only seen two scorpions in our house since we moved to Arizona in 2007, which is cause for some celebration. I know people who have moved into houses on “The Scorpion Trail,” migratory paths that aren’t altered just because someone decides to plop a house in the way. For them, seeing several scorpions a week is common.

It’s a fact of desert life that just about every living thing out here is designed to sting, bite or prick you. From the tiny bark scorpions to cactus to the thorns of sweet acacia and honey mesquite trees — the flora and fauna of the desert are evolutionary examples of “the best offense is a good defense.”

When Lea got stung, she called the National Poison Control Center which, consistent with the previous paragraph, is based in Phoenix. Jason, our scorpion sting answer man, called back every couple of hours to check on Lea and to share advice about what to do next. They have a wealth of operating experience to share on what to do when scorpions attack. (Okay, that was a little melodramatic. The scorpion didn’t really attack; Lea actually just stepped on it. But something about scorpions calls for hyperbole.)

After a traumatic experience, it’s natural to want to learn from the event — but it’s important to learn the right lesson.

As Mark Twain once observed:

A cat who sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. But he won’t sit on a cold stove, either.

One example of learning the right lesson from our scorpion operating experience is that I have started wearing shoes around the house, especially when it’s dark — because our pointy-tailed arthropod friends are nocturnal.

But like the cat in Mark Twain’s quote, I have been spotting imaginary scorpions everywhere in the mottled-brown pattern of our tile floors ever since Lea got stung. It’s a little unsettling to live in a space you’re convinced is infested with scorpions, so I got out my trusty black light flashlights (one in each hand) to go scorpion hunting. Since scorpions literally glow in the dark, they give you black light flashlights when you close on a house. (I made that last part up.)

I went through every room in the dark with my flashlights feeling a little like Dexter looking for blood splatter. I even shined the lights underneath tables and chairs because — if I haven’t instilled a morbid fear of scorpions yet, add this to the mix — bark scorpions can climb walls and hang upside down.

The celebratory result of my scorpion search?  Zero. The only one I saw was the dead scorpion Lea whacked with a shoe after getting stung. And under the black light, it shined like a full moon.

The reason I am such a strong advocate for sharing and learning from operating experience is that my entire career has been devoted to the nuclear industry where the sharing of operating experience is truly unprecedented within corporate America. Electric utilities that guard their intellectual property fiercely in other areas share their nuclear operating experience openly. It has a lot to do with the fact that mistakes at one nuclear plant affect all the others — that we are, in essence, hostages of each other.

This was eloquently stated by Pat Haggerty, who was president and CEO of Texas Instruments when he served on the presidential commission that investigated the Three Mile Island accident in 1979:

There always exists, even though the probability of occurrence is very low, the potential for a catastrophic accident from a nuclear generating plant. Every licensee, from a safety standpoint is the captive of every other licensee, because poor safety procedures at any plant resulting in an accident will have immediate detrimental consequences on the management and operation of every other plant.

Another field where the sharing of operating experience could have a major positive impact is within the medical community. But the fear of litigation is so strong that medical professionals are reluctant to openly share their mistakes and near misses. And that’s why human error is still unacceptably high in our hospitals as discussed in Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science, a disturbingly frank book written by Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

But even when operating experience is shared, it’s difficult to get people to heed the message. Dr. Zack T. Pate, a former boss of mine who is chairman emeritus of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations and the World Association of Nuclear Operators, had this to say about the difficulty of getting people to truly learn from operating experience:

Do not underestimate the difficulty of using and internalizing operating experience. We all have a strong tendency to read some form of operating experience and say, ‘Gee, this is a good lesson for those folks, but I would never make that dumb mistake….. That is such a powerful, instinctive reaction that it is worth writing this principle to keep in mind the difficulty of getting people to internalize operating experience.

One final learning from our scorpion experience that I hope you internalize? No pesticide can deter them. In fact, scorpions — along with cockroaches — were found to survive nuclear test blasts. So the best way to keep them at bay is to eliminate their food source — crickets.

The Terminix guy arrives today.