An expensive typo
A former managing editor was willing to pay a headhunter $1,720 to spruce up her resume and send it out ... until they accidentally inserted gibberish into it, making her look like an ass to 200 potential employers.
Four days later, she received an e-mail from Bud Weiser Chevrolet-Cadillac in Beloit stating, "Barbara, received your letter, but I am not sure what a 70E.R1B,EWI.5381 does. Maybe you could fill me in, and we could go from there," according to the lawsuit.The former editor's next endeavor? Suing the job firm, seeking more than $75,000 for humiliation, mental anguish, emotional pain and loss of professional reputation.
The next day, she received a copy of the letter from a Madison public relations firm with the gibberish and the words "executive metro editor" circled in pink, the word "Proofread," and a question mark highlighted, according to the lawsuit.
One other note: Bud Weiser Chevrolet-Cadillac? Are you kidding me?
posted by Nicole @ 12:48 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Oops! I think that any kind of commercial writing should be proofread or cross-checked by someone other than the author. I do this for all my paid work but I'm too cheap to pay a subeditor to copy edit my blog. Perhaps that's the next step!
When I applied to the Post (for the job that got me in the door), my printer was down and so I went to the local Kinko's with a floppy disk to get on a computer and print out my resume and cover letter.
Well, it seems that the computer there had been infected with the with the "wazzu" virus, and so my Education and my Experience and my cover letter suddenly included a lot of "wazzu." It would have been very easy for me to neglect proofreading these documents that I had looked at hundreds of times at home and hadn't changed since, but fortunately I took one more look.
Matthew, I think pretty much everyone is too cheap to pay for editing on their blogs, even professional organizations. The public seems to be more forgiving in this format. And, luckily, we can go back and correct errors.
Bill, that's one of the scariest stories I've heard in a while. I shudder to think.
That would have been terrible if that "wazzu" thing had gotten through. History might have changed, and an entire generation of "copy editors" would have been denied the delusion that reading a book about style would have any importance in today's design-obsessed newsrooms.
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