One of the worst days of my life

That one rings a bell. And as trivial as it sounds, I don't think you can screw up a worse thing than the lotto numbers...it's small but could seriously change somebody's life if he doesn't double check.

 

Former Kansas play-by-play man Max Falkenstein told a story once that an opponent had a player who kicked and punted. During a punt, he inadvertently combined "kick" and "punt". I think you can figure out what ol' Max said on the air.

As for me, I once covered a basketball game that ran late. Kid smacked his head on the floor, resulting in an ambulance call. I was really under deadline pressure because of it. I talked to one coach as he walked off the floor. I wrote my story. My editor reads the first edition after it comes out and says,

"Um ... King, the Bumblefuck coach you quoted? He died a month ago."

My jaw hit the floor. Luckily, we have two editions and I was able to fix the online edition. But holy crap, was I embarrassed.

One more - at the town I used to live in, Halloween was canceled because of a bad winter storm. Many people were upset that it wasn't rescheduled, but the city manager - Bob Halloran - stood firm. "Halloran" on spellcheck gets a few suggestions. The first once is Halloween. Whoever edited the story clicked "change all" instead of "ignore all". The guy's name ran in the paper for this story as Bob Halloween.

He was pissed.

 

Obit. The deceased was young and recently married. The mugshot submitted with the obit was of the couple. Both members of the couple had gender-neutral names (something like Pat and Chris). Pat was the deceased. Chris's mugshot ran with it, for one edition.

 

That poor nail. You just smashed it right on the head.

 

I work in print but this little gem happened at my radio gig.

While multitasking 10 different things in the producers room I attempted to send out a tweet on the afternoon drive show's twitter feed:

"Who is the bigger diva, LeBron or Favre?"

Interestingly enough, I never noticed the letter "b" on the keyboard is right next to the letter "n"

I erased the unintentional racial slur seconds later but it had already been retweeted nearly 100 times.

After my one day paid suspension (which is now my fantasy football team name) I was back at work with my tail between my legs.

We laugh about it now, but I certainly felt like the world was coming to an end for a few weeks.

 

Yeah, I felt awful when I got a kid's name wrong in a game story earlier this year. The kid was a quarterback for the local high school and shared the same last name as a kid who'd led another school to the state basketball championship the year before.

Somehow, I merged the two and called the kid Marcus when his name was actually Jake. That was pretty embarrassing.

 

Aaron,

I am late to the party, but I want to give you credit for owning up.

I didn't see any "the desk should have caught it" or "spellcheck screwed it up" or "I was really drunk and hit the wrong key."

Realizing you screwed up is the only way to avoid the next one.

And we've all been there. If you didn't feel horrible the next day, you shouldn't be in the business.

 

God, I wish I had read this thread last week.

Finished my section up earlier than usual, proofed my pages three times in all (once while editing stories, another after paginating the page, once more before submitting the final copy).

Still managed to misspell the word "tobacco" in a headline. Called it "tabacco".

Yeah, it's nothing major but I felt sick to my stomach because of it all weekend.

So, yeah, original poster, thanks. Your mistake makes mine feel better.

 

I once told two counties' worth of all-county wrestlers to come in for the big all-area photo shoot. Got the whole thing all set up. The kids got permission from school to miss a few hours to come to the big downtown newsroom for a few hours. Car pools were created. Directions handed out.

Then I had to call all of them back the next day and tell them the photo shoot was only for kids who made the all-area team, not the lowly all-county teams.

 

The bigger mistake there was calling back and canceling. I would have taken the photos and made the best of it and ran the all-county ones small or something.

Is it really worth that much bad feeling to tell them to stay away?

 

Wish you worked with us when this all went down. Plus, that's way too logical for a newspaper.

 

Yesterday, I was in a Target parking lot and saw a bumper sticker that read:

"Recue dogs:
Who rescued who?

But I couldn't find a marker in my truck.