It appeared in the Saturday Review some years back: a public apology for a typo made on invitations to a stamp collector’s convention in Norwalk, California (CA). The invitations had named the host city as “Norwalk, Connecticut” (CT), and the apology was addressed to the nearly 800 people who thus traveled to the wrong end of the country.
There’s fair evidence that the incident was fictional and the announcement was coined by the Review‘s editors as a joke. Nonetheless, I’ve personally seen the same thing occur on a smaller scale. There may be literal miles of difference between “1110 Main Street” and “11110 Main Street” (count the 1′s), or between “210 N. Gessner” and “210 S. Gessner.” There may be thousands of dollars of difference, too, if you spend months chasing a prospect, finally get him to agree to an appointment, and then let him waste half an hour waiting for you at the wrong location.
Then there was the time L. L. Bean incurred the unexpected expense of buying an additional toll-free number because its 1999 back-to-school catalog asked buyers to call 800-LLB-KIDS instead of 877-LLB-KIDS. And what about the announcement that listed the time for a meeting as “7 a.m.” instead of p.m.? Twelve hours of difference in one little letter.
So next time you “don’t have time” to proofread a memo and are tempted to think, “What difference do a few tiny typos make anyway?”–now you know.
