Proofreading

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What are some examples of times when you did not proofread your work or messages and what happened as a result?

three times, human resources @ work scheduled me to work 10am to 5am (instead of 5pm). i told her and she fixed it. however, if i were not to have told her, and just clocked out @ 5pm as usual, i do not know if the computer system would've flagged my worthless corpse as "failure to adhere to posted schedule" and then an Occurrence or write up.



precious lil "people" f**k up and get no punishment. i f**k up and it's like the solar system collapses s**t. (rolls eyes)

I used to work in magazines so proofreading was really important but also you kind of got used to the fact that sometimes mistakes happen - it's a hazard of the job.

But there was one which haunts me to this day. I'd written an article about skydiving. In the UK there's a military skydiving display team called the Red Devils. In the article I'd said they were part of the Royal Air Force but they're not, they're part of the Royal Army and I knew that but I still wrote the wrong thing and I didn't notice when I checked it and the sub-editor of the magazine didn't pick it up, nor did the editor so it was published that way and those guys were pissed off. If you're going to misattribute someone, try to make sure it isn't a crack team of paratroopers.

I wrote a PM to friend on another forum, but accidentally posted it in the public forum of yet another forum that I'd just joined. None of the PM content was related to WP, but it was fairly personal with some swear words and stuff, and references to inside jokes. I'm sure it didn't make a good impression on the forum where I posted it. It took me a good five minutes to notice and was able to delete it just seconds before the delete-window would have expired.

I can't think of any professional mishaps.

Professionally I'm a developer, so I do a different kind of proofreading than emails or text, and I've screwed up fantastically a couple of times by failing to proofread my code before implementing it. One time I accidentally created an infinite loop that shut down the entire intranet for maybe 15 minutes before I got into the backend and stopped it. I was horrified, but not as horrified as the time I accidentally set a loop to email the CEO 300 times in a few seconds before I noticed and killed it. She was so confused, but thankfully not that upset. I was quick to send her an apologetic email. It helped that the thing I was building was requested specifically by her. I didn't get any complaints about the intranet being down so I got super lucky and either nobody noticed, or the people who did notice didn't care enough to report it.

Personally, I'm really bad at proofreading messages, posts, and texts. Part of it is that I have a bad filter. Part of it is that I'm dyslexic so I'll get word order and words in general wrong. Yet another part is that I have a bad habit of correcting people when they get facts wrong - especially pertaining to what I've written or done, like the people who try to summarize your problem but get it wrong? It's definitely started arguments, and I'd wished in hindsight I'd proofed better, but I can't think of any specific examples.

one time, at an unpaid internship, i saved a file as "f**k (something)" and i meant to save it again as a different name but forgot. the supervisor just stopped going to the meetings. he never even told me i was redundant or anything like that. that was in 2016.

december 2022, i wrote an email to my (former) "friend" dena. we had not interacted (in person, phone, or email, since may 2022). i wrote a paragraph about dena's aikido instructor, kayla b***h. in 2014, kayla b***h had the nerve to bark @ me for leaving brandon (another instructor's) lesson early. and then 2020, kayla b***h's "volunteer", rolando penis, had the nerve to tell me that he "talked to sensei about what 'happened' last week" and that my "breathing exercise" was "disrespectful" and that if i was going to be like that, rolando penis had the authority to ban me from the dojo. rolando penis made every customer come to the front and do a "breathing exercise". i said i didn't wanna do it and he said "next week do it." fine. so my "breathing exercise" was "the litterbox". (rolls eyes). rolando penis totally overreacted. "the litterbox" *is* a "breathing exercise". besides, rolando penis wasn't that "respectful" to me in that he: (1) had the nerve to laugh @ me (2) said "huh" instead of "excuse me" (3) stooped to my level literally even though he is not tall and i am not short (4) kept asking "are you ok?" @ every slightest hiccup. but WTF ever, s**t. i meant to just write "kayla" but "kayla b***h" just kind of slipped out and i failed to proofread. as a result of that (or for any other reason), dena hasn't contacted me since then but WTF ever, s**t. if dena could not "pick your battles" and the slightest "mistake" is the end of her "friendship", maybe she wasn't my "friend" to begin with, s**t!

To Rhapsody: Please see my reply here.

"should", "can" and "will" are three different things.