One of our employees recently moved on from our company. In her resignation email she addressed her Indian boss as “Dear Mr. O’Leary”. When the email routed to me I laughed out loud. She must have copied and pasted resignation text, written generically to an Irish man. Sent incorrectly to a South Asian one, the error exposed the hazards of copy-paste.
Before I pontificate on the merits of original thought, let me admit that I have copy-pasted when confronted with brain freeze. In full disclosure, when I founded our company, the By-Laws came from internet sites, as did the Articles of Incorporation. I made them ours with appropriate changes. I did not want to start from scratch on these docs for fear of leaving out important content.
Since I am in confession-mode, I’ll (sheepishly) admit that I’ve made a few spectacular gaffes in my life.
Like the time Outlook changed “Dear Mahmood” (a distinguished and older client contact) to “Dear Manhood”. My fast fingers clicked right thru the change. I was mortified. I hesitated following up with a mea culpa email because that would just draw more attention to it. And I hesitated not doing anything because he would feel insulted. So, I called him and apologized. He was very gracious but I aged a few years in the ensuing chaos.
Or, the time when “Got a sec?” turned into to “Got a sex?” just as I sent the text to my colleague. Full-on weird!! Thankfully I’ve known him a very long time and we were able to laugh over it. After that episode, I turned off autocorrect on my phone and typed things like - Hot a zec? One key off and straight into gibberish. I can't seem to live with or without autocorrect!
On these mistakes I can at least take refuge in software interference. Forgetting to replace O'Leary is sheer carelessness, along the lines of people calling me "Remy". Instead of feeling blue, I try my best to find humor in daily mistakes - intentional and unintentional...
