One of the worst days of my life

You thought you were going through your entire career and not make a mistake? Not to make things worse, but you're going to make another one somewhere down the road. This is called not being perfect.

 

We got this in print once: "The goalie let the soft shit slip between his pads."

 

In the days of the backshop, the Green Bay paper wrote this headline on Guv Tommy Thompson's line-item vetoes: "Thompson's pen is a sword"

The backshop guys didn't leave sufficient spacing between "pen" and "is."

Fax machines around the state lit up with that one.

 

Technically "douche" only means wash. Just claim you're taking the word back for mankind...start a movement!

 

Aaron, as others have said, it's happened to everyone and you'll survive. One of my first weeks on the job, covered a football game. Wrote the gamer - what a great gamer! - and made the drive to my grandma's, 15 miles away. I was staying with her until I found a place. At about 1 a.m., I thought to myself, did I call the star of the game and my story Doug Masters, instead of Mitch? Doug Masters...lead character in the immortal Iron Eagle. Good God, no I didn't? I started going through my head, I thought I remembered typing Doug, instead of Mitch. I quoted him and everything.

I couldn't handle waiting until morning so I drove back to the paper. It was long past deadline but I checked the final proofs. And I had, indeed, called this kid Doug Masters.

Never heard anything about it, not even from the kid. They were on the outskirts of our area so he might not have even seen it. But it of course haunted me anyway. What a screwup. But...life went on.

A few years later a guy at a weekly paper wrote a column about a star player. Except he used the first name of the kid's brother, a kid who had been killed in a car accident two months earlier. The guy wanted to quit, but he didn't and...life went on.

You also mentioned that you don't know if you'll ever accomplish enough to erase the memory.

Meet Clyde Haberman. Longtime columnist for the New York Times, been part of their Pulitzer Prize-winning stories. And back in 1966, he got fired from the Times when he was in his early 20s, for putting in a fake name and a fake award in endless agate about commencements at Columbia and City College. Made it up, got canned and the editor told him he'd never work at the Times again. Gay Talese wrote about it in the Kingdom and the Power. Gay Talese immortalized his fuck-up!

Yet a decade later he was back at the Times. And he's made his career there ever since, becoming one of the most respected writers in the country.

http://www.bookofjoe.com/2006/05/the_guy_who_fir.html

He still remembers what happened and regrets it. But that was an intentional screwup. He knew what he was doing. Yet he overcame it.

You had a typo. You'll have many more in your career. But you'll get over those and you'll get over this one.

 

I wrote an entire story about a local club basketball coach and called him "McDonald" instead of "McDaniel" in the entire fucking story. Then I almost got sued for a different paragraph in the same story about the coach who he replaced. And I somehow misspelled THAT guy's name too, though I was only one letter off. Small victories.

The ME called me to his office and said "How could you fuck up that bad, that often, in 12 inches??" I had no answer.

I was 22 years old and had been a full-time sportswriter for 2 months. I thought I was done. But I wasn't...it was a learning experience that proved that I had to pay close attention, no matter how much of a throwaway the story is.

The sun came up the next day, and it has every day since. I got promoted a year later and had several years in newspapers that I'm very proud of before going to dot-com land.

Mistakes happen. I promise, you WILL laugh about this one soon. Maybe not today, but soon.

 

I had, in quotes from a college coach, "Team A is a scrappy team." I just left out the "s."

Crappy.

If this is the worst day of your life, then you are very, very young.

 

We had, at my first paper, an editorial written by the publisher. Only someone did autocorrect on spellcheck and it made one key change: It said she set her silverware down on the placenta. Not placemat.

In a column by the publisher.

No one got fired, no one died. We laughed, we moved on. You'll get past it. But it's good you care this much...just don't let it haunt you.

 

Worked for a guy once who took a call-in ... "Candice Hunt scored 12 points."

Problem. He hit the "C" instead of the "H" for her last name. Wrote her a nice apology, we all laughed about it, coach & kid understood, everything was OK after that.

Same guy once wrote a story about a guy and put the wrong last name in for the entire story. Felt terrible but that stuff does happen.

Wake up tomorrow and the sun will come up. Typos happen.

 

And think of the poor guy at the LA Times who typed Cheryl David's aunt's obit.

 

At least you weren't roasting nuts.

 

At a place I once worked, something got effed up with the graphics on the cover of our football tab one year and it made part of the cover story unreadable. Somehow it got into print without anyone noticing.

So the next day we republished the cover story with an editor's note explaining there had been a problem the day before ... and in the headline of the reprint, we misspelled someone's name.