One of the worst days of my life

I once got the name of the title sponsor of a NASCAR race wrong in the MASTHEAD of a special section. 1.1 million copies.

 

Don't worry, it will probably only be a decade before you're known as something other than "the guy who wrote about Mother Nature douching"


Don't worry, at your paper one day you'll write something mean about Coach Saban and you'll get death threats and all this will seem like nothing.

 

I wish my worst mistake was funny like many of these are. Sadly, it's not. I'm reluctant to share, but figure it might be helpful for OP to see that mistakes can be far worse than "doused" being turned into "douched."

I was into the third week of coverage of one capital murder trial in a series of three for a brutal gang execution. One of four original co-defendants had pleaded out to second-degree murder in exchange for cooperating with the prosecution.

About two-thirds of the way into one of my daily wrap stories of the trial in one paragraph I transposed the names of the cooperating co-defendant and one of the guys whose capital trial was still pending. Out of context, that one paragraph left the impression that the yet-to-be-tried co-defendant was cooperating with police, when he wasn't.

I found out about the error the next morning when I was confronted outside the courthouse by that guy's family claiming that I'd made him out to be a snitch and now he was going to get killed in prison.

He never got hurt, at least not because of my story, and eventually took his own plea. But that mistake still churns my gut when I think about it.

 

Aaron,

Seriously, you have to own this and stop letting it get you down. Since you're a board regular (so they say) you should create the handle "Mother Nature's Douchebag" and go from there.

It's hard to laugh at someone who's already laughing at themself.

 

Mizzou....You're right. I have to roll with it. It's just hard to shake. Only a decade, huh? Naturally I worry about how this could affect the future. But you impart some wise words. It'll get easier to laugh about once the pain/nausea goes away. But thanks for keeping me laughing about it. It truly helps.

 

Just save franticscribe's post above.

The nausea will dissipate instantly.

 

It will have zero negative impact on your future. As others have said, this is your story to tell for the rest of your life.

If anything, this can be a talking point on your interviews when you decide you need to get the hell out of Tuscaloosa. How many of us can say one of our stories was talked about on The Tonight Show?

You made a mistake. A goddamned hilarious mistake, but every person in the business knows how easily something like that can happen.

 

Way back in my day I was alone in the slot on a slow night. One of our beat writers filed his story with his own last name mispelled in the byline. Somehow he managed to convince himself that I was at fault.

And our bylines weren't just John Doe, Sports Writer, they were John Doe, Tribune Tattler Sports Writer. And of course one day I mispelled Tattler.

 

And, of course, there's the story from about five years ago of the newspaper that misspelled its own name in the 1A flag ...

 

I once worked for a paper where, when there was an error, an editor gave you a form to fill out, detailing the mistake with all the minute details. What they did with this paperwork, I don't know; maybe they pulled them out during your annual performance review so they could give you a smaller raise. It was bad enough you made a mistake; then you had undergo the equivalent of a parent scolding a 4-year-old: "Did you learn your lesson?!"

 

That's funny. At a place I interned, they made you write your own corrections.

This is what one of the writers filed. Obviously, it didn't run this way.

"The (paper) mistakenly reported that players X,Y and Z were acquired in a 1992 trade for player Q. The players acquired for player Q were actually players X,Y and P. The (paper) regrets the error and the beat writer should be shot."

 

I run a correction on something that was correct once.

I accidentally put "shit" in a story instead of "shot".

I was mortified on both occasions, but like others have said, you'll move on from it.