I Didn’t Know People Could Be So Stupid

When you review a proposal and the author has misspelled HER OWN LAST NAME, then you know that this person didn’t even read it over after she wrote it.

Obviously, this mistake was a typo. (At least, I hope it was, or else she has more problems than I thought.) But to send out a document that you typed, with your name on it, and with your name misspelled? My mind boggles at the idea.

One or two mistakes in a document is pretty normal, especially if what you’re reviewing is an early draft. But during the 30 seconds that I was staring, with increasing horror, at the document, I saw other typos, grammatical errors, and punctuation mistakes. I wasn’t even reading the document, but was skimming it, and there were still more mistakes in this than I have ever seen in my father’s project summaries that he wrote for work and asked me to review when I was in high school.

My father didn’t learn English until he was over 30. And he has never sent out anything this awful, including the email he sent to me that read, “Hane. If you go to Wallmart could you buy several distill water for me? I still can suive 2-3 wks. When next time you go there, take a look. iF YOU FIND IT PLEASE BUY IT FOR ME. i SHOUGHT NEED TO KEEP TO AVOID RAISE HEAVY STUFF NOW.”

I am astounded that anyone could even physically produce a document this bad. I mean, Word even UNDERLINES the words it thinks are misspelled — how hard is it to just skim through a document after you’ve written it and look for the little red lines? DO YOU NEED BILL GATES TO PERSONALLY WALK OVER TO YOUR HOUSE AND POINT AT THESE WORDS BEFORE YOU CAN SEE THEM?!?

I’m not even going to go into the sheer horror of knowing that there are people out there who would hire someone to write a proposal who cannot write. Or type, evidently. Or proofread. Or see little red lines.

HER OWN LAST NAME.

What is this world coming to?

Posted by: ssjane | July 27, 2007 | 12:45 pm
Posted in: Rants