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.


