Feb 5th, 2010
Waste and Even More Waste: Poor Proofreading Makes For Tough Decisions
Argh. I’m annoyed with myself.
I ordered a bunch of mini style (or “Moo” style, although I did not buy these from Moo) cards printed with info on my Livestrong Challenge effort, to ask people I met in real life to contribute to the cause. It took a few days but the cards–a thousand of them!–showed up at home.
And the URL to my Livestrong Challenge page… was misspelled.
I have no one to blame but the guy in the mirror. I didn’t proofread well enough.
What to do? I thought about ordering a new batch, but that seemed wasteful–not just in spending more money but in throwing out these cards that were otherwise perfectly usable. So instead, I decided to cover up the incorrect URL with a correct one by printing out the correct URL on self adhesive labels–which costs me about $8 and used the cards that were otherwise inaccurate, solving the problem and not wasting the cards, but still costing me lots of time, effort, and $8.
But of course, the best thing to do would have been to not make the error in the first place.
So in the end, I had a choice between a lot of waste and just some waste. I chose just some. If I had been more careful, there could have been no waste at all.
[...] They printed and shipped quickly and due to the size of my order shipped free. They are very nicely done–the little sticker for the URL is due to my own error which I blogged about not long ago. [...]