“Hello Sexy Hunter!”
That is what many people heard last fall when they called the number issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). One number switched with another on the duck stamp could have cost the USFWS hundreds of thousands of dollars. Last fall there was 3.5 million duck stamps printed with the number 1-800-872-6724 (1-800-TRAMP24) on them instead of 1-800-782-6724 (1-800-STAMP24).
The first number led the callers to “Intimate Connections” instead of the USFWS licensing department. Instead of a person asking you which license you would like to purchase, you were connected to a heavy breathing female telling you what you could get for $1.99 a minute! How many times do you think the duck stamp was looked at by high officials of the USFWS? I am sure it was numerous times, but every one of them failed to look at the number. How many of you think you would have proofread the number instead of just looking at the picture and the writing on it?
This is a big reason why everything has to be proofread many times and every mistake has to be fixed before anything is circulated. This has changed many people’s opinions on how professional the USFWS is. It was just a simple mistake that could have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for the government. If the USFWS would have recalled all of the stamps and issued new ones, it would have cost $300,000. That is a huge loss just because of a little mistake that no one caught before issuing the stamps.
The credibility of a company or organization can change in many people’s opinions with just one little mistake. How would you have liked to been the person answering the phone for the USFWS to help the customers that had called the number already? I’m sure most people were polite after hearing what had happened, but I’m sure there were quite a few rude people also.
This is a huge example of why companies require every email to be reviewed by at least three to five different people. Every little mistake in a big company can end up costing thousands of dollars. It might not loss that can be seen, but a loss in business that they were going to get and business that ended up leaving the company because of the lack of professionalism. Do you think you have ever been judged by a misspelling?
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This is a funny article because it’s so avoidable that it's kind of ridiculous. However, like you mentioned up above that most people probably wouldn't proofread a phone number. The USFWS probably had to do some publicity to recover after that mistake. And your right, their credibility for some followers did probably go down because it was such a simple and avoidable error that nobody seemed to catch. When people misspell words they are looked down upon in somewhat of way as being less educated and not an intelligent person. This for a big company could be a costly mistake.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on this subject, proofreading is a big part to all businesses. By not proofreading a company can look like it is poorly managed and not taken seriously. When a company is not taken seriously it will hurt their sales and when their sales are hurt the gross profit goes down and if a business is not making a good profit then people are going to start losing jobs. Proofreading is one of those things that seems like it is small but it can have a large impact.
ReplyDeleteHow funny is that? Calling up the licensing Department and getting a chick breathing heavily hah that’s got to be one of the funniest things I have heard of. I bet there will be some proof reading before the next duck stamp is printed and sent out. I think that everyone makes mistakes and this is just one of them mistake that will be looked at a little closer the next time to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
ReplyDeleteI do think that is funny, what happen. I do agree that going over every detail on something that vital is very important. By doing this, it would avoid any costly mistakes that would/could occur when releasing anything news related or press release. also I would think that any government agencies would have looked at the phone number that could be mistaking for when dialing the toll free number.... at least I would think that.
ReplyDeleteThat was a pretty bad mistake that the USFWS made. You would think that at least one person would have looked at the number and thought, “Hey, that isn’t right. It should be 1-800-782-6724, not 1-800-872-6724. We should change that right away.” Apparently they must have been in a hurry to get the stamp out on time. If someone had taken five minutes or more to check that all the information was correct that mistake could have been avoided. Mistakes happen to most people, but when it happens to a big company or organization, people seem to really scrutinize them for it. There is a well known idiom, “To Err Is Human, To Forgive Divine”. This basically means, (when people do things wrong we should try hard to forgive them because all people make mistakes ... ). The idiom and explanation are from this site, http://www.goenglish.com/ToErrIsHumanToForgiveDivine.asp.
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