Typ-o.

Typ-o.

I just cried in my friend's office over the stupidest of typos ever to be a stupid typo.

Friday afternoon, I finally released a document I've been writing since May. Nine months of gestation. Anyway, I didn't write all of it, as evidenced by my next paragraph. Today, I finally got ahold of a printed sample from our vendor. It was shiny and beautiful. Mostly.

In one section, I pulled a lot of work from stuff my subject matter expert compiled in the field. I quickly cleaned it all up and fixed his insistent misspelling of "minute" as "minuets" and made the grammar a little happier. I'm TOTALLY NOT RISKING MYSELF FOR DOOCAGE here by naming the actual offending assembly, but I'll tell you that something on one of our machines is called a somewhat common word with an added "-or" at the end. Almost everyone accidentally writes "-er," except us dilligent technical writers and other nice law-abiding people who follow rules.

My subject matter expert marches to the beat of his own drummer in many ways, one of which being his writing. He's a very intelligent, educated, literate man (we once argued about "optimal" vs. "optimum" when used as an adjective and he busted out the latin root definition and original usage, without looking anything up), but he CAN'T SPELL MINUTE. Nor can he decide to use "-or" or "-er." He had both.

Spell check is a ridiculous tool in our documents in Frame Maker. I like to turn off the "smart quotes" feature, otherwise my inches turn into curly little quotations, but spell check stops on every.single.quote telling me that I can't do that and I certainly can't add that shit to my dictionary. I end up pressing "skip" a lot. Also, the "-or" word isn't a real word, so I either add that to the dictionary or get lazy and press skip.

I, apparantly, missed some "-er" words. I know it's not that big of a deal, because nobody really knows/cares how to spell the assembly name anyway, but I'm just disappointed in myself. I was fine until I relayed the story to someone else and realized how preventable of a mistake this was, a giant non-hormonal but instead hygene-neglect-based blemish on my beaming pride of project completion.

Stupid -er words. Fuckors.