I’m starting off the day with my favourite treat of the coffee family: a latte. Not only is it a latte, it’s large, it’s foamy, it’s caffeinated, it’s not even skim. And it’s sugary. Ah, feel the goodness! A big thank you to the best husbando in the world – that would be my husband. Not yours. :) Without him I would be a whole lot crankier today. It’s been a hella week. I am ready for a change.
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Shoes have been ordered. I haven’t received a confirmation. Should I be worried?
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Now where was I?
So I was working on a website. I won’t say where, or when, because I don’t want to embarrass anyone (other than myself of course). But before I get into the story I have to ask: have you ever thought about how you read? The process is pretty interesting. Advanced readers identify words as a whole, by shape, not letter by letter. (This is also why it’s more of a strain to read text that is written in all-caps, because it’s all the same shape and your eye is forced to look at the letters and it slows you down.)
Some readers are able to process the word-shapes better than others and can get through text faster. They swim over it, pulling what they need in order to identify the context. I think that words leading up to other words imply the meaning, so parts of sentences can be skipped altogether.
For example, if I was to write: “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” you can practically skip the latter half of the sentence because you probably know how it’s going to end as soon as you start reading it. Words like “and” “if” “but” can be dropped altogether.
I am a terrible reader. I have to force myself to slow down, and sometimes even go back to reread things. For some reason my eye-brain partnership works against me sometimes and glosses over entire strings of words.
The unfortunate by-product of skimming as you’re writing and working is that words might get missed. And sometimes letters get missed here and there. Thank goodness for spell check, right? Ha.
Now where was I? Oh, yes. In my defense, I would like to say that I wasn’t actually doing any writing. I was just cutting and pasting text from one document (input by someone else) into another document that was being uploaded to the Internet. By me.
I don’t remember the details of the task I was working on, but I think it was a list of jobs.
What I read as PUBLIC ADMINISTRATOR, was, in reality was written like this: PUBIC ADMINISTRATOR. That critical letter L had gone AWOL and I hadn’t even noticed. One little letter = something entirely different.
I uploaded the document. I think I discovered my error later, and corrected it. I told some of my co-workers. I remember chuckling about it in the kitchen, “hahaha what kind of job is it, I wonder, a PUBIC administrator bwaahahahahaha.” While I was laughing, I felt a teeny bit bad. But not too bad. I don’t think that the client ever found out, but Management, that was a different story. Their sense of humour evaporated. They didn’t find my mistake very funny at all. It’s unprofessional, you know. It would have been fine had they said: “hey you, overworked-person-in-the-web-department-of-one, can you please make sure it doesn’t happen again? Okay?” I would have walked away feeling just fine with a reprimand. But they didn’t say that. They made An Issue out of it, and made me feel like utter krep, like I was some kind of flunkie who regularly walked into work DRUNK or USED MY WORK COMPUTER TO STORE MY PORN collection. Heaven forbid.
Flashback:
I was 10 or 11 years old and I wrote a sign for my father’s television/hi-fi/video store. He hung it up on the window behind the front counter. I can’t remember what it said exactly, only that I made the same mistake: writing “pubic” instead of “public”. “Videos free for pubic use” or “we love the pubic” I don’t know. Silently, he took it down, and added the missing letter L with a swift stroke. It didn’t look right because it was clearly added as an afterthought. I am not sure how long this sign lasted.
Anyway, the situation at my workplace added to my misery and solidified a few things in my mind. Most importantly however, I realized that I should never rely on spellcheck.
