Humans are prone to make mistakes for a variety of reasons. In this post, I tackle small typing mistakes that may or may not have a rippling effect.
Recently, I noticed a funny mistake. The post read that a gentleman put his hand in his pocket to take out his wallet money. Instead what he typed was “wallet monkey”. Great if we could keep monkeys in wallets. In another post, I read an ad promoting a “softwear” instead of software. This is an example of confusion in the mind because wear and ware share the same pronunciation.
The above mistakes may not have any effect on the readers other than making them smile. However, not all small mistakes are innocent as some may become very costly.
Examples of Costly Small Mistakes
I share two examples of my experience with small mistakes that were very costly.
Would you expect that small mistakes, such as training a course written repeatedly as “training coarse” would lead to great losses? This happened.
I got a consultancy job to work for a company that was developing a new electrifying system. I noticed first that the specs of imported copper were never inspected. Any impurity in copper lowers its electrical conductivity. Moreover, the prices of copper vary depending on its purity. This higher purity is the higher its price shall be. I talked to the project manager who did not react at all to my worries about the quality of imported copper. I still recall him saying “Copper is copper”. Then I realized something fishy was going on.
One day the project manager was typing a report advising the company to initiate training courses. He repeatedly typed “training coarse”. I alerted him to this mistake. He insisted on typing it coarse. He even said there is no such word as course. My suspicion grew of him, and I talked to the owners of the company. They decided to inspect the validity of his qualifications as an electrical engineer. It turned out that he worked in construction and had no university degree. The company lost more than half a million dollars on false research. The small mistake of typing coarse instead of course led to the arrest of the fake engineer and put him in jail.
This was a case of monkey money. Money that goes down the drain.
The second example is about an employee who joined a research institute claiming that he worked for a huge company abroad. One day a guest asked him what company he worked for twenty years. He said I worked for “Daw Chemicals”. What is the activity of this company, the guest asked? It is a famous chemical company How do you spell it? He spelled right. The guest jumped in astonishment mixed with denial. He added you want to tell me that you worked for a company for twenty years and still you do not know how to pronounce its name correctly”?
To cut the story short this man never worked for that company and all his certificates were fake.
You may have probably heard of the story of the ad story in which the company promoted “exotic travel”. The publisher instead typed erotic instead exotic. This small typo cost the publisher about nineteen million dollars.
Do not belittle little mistakes, as they could be very costly.
