Spell Check Fail
Last week was surely the beginning of a very long week for a certain Boston-based commercial real estate firm. While The Teller scrolled through Monday’s usual pile of press releases, one proved particularly eye-catching with its use of a certain word that presented itself in all caps and a bold font.
What would have been an innocent enough email stating the details of a company’s new lease turned out to be the biggest Monday morning gasp and laugh for the staff of Banker & Tradesman – and all because of a simple, and all-too-unfortunate – spelling mistake.
Commercial real estate firm NAI Hunneman somehow managed to misspell their name a total of 13 times throughout last week’s infamous press release. It seems the company was determined to change its name to “NAZI Hunneman.” Now, The Teller can understand a little spelling mistake every once in a while. After all, The Teller is in the publishing industry. A slip of the pinky on the keyboard that no one else catches when proofreading before the send button is clicked – that can be overlooked. But typing the word “NAZI” (or maybe a simple cut & paste) a whole 13 times? It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that either: A) NAI Hunneman’s press team needs a serious lesson in proofreading or B) A very disgruntled employee or intern pulled off a prank that no one will soon forget.
If The Teller weren’t so kind and generous, this press release would have promptly been forwarded on to Failblog.org in hopes of being included in its daily updates of everything that is hilariously wrong. Instead of being mean-spirited about it all, The Teller is going to offer a helpful tip so no one ever mistakes NAI Hunneman as Nazi sympathizers.
You get what you pay for. If NAI Hunneman pissed off an overworked employee or unpaid intern, The Teller hopes this was a lesson well learned. Now, instead of relying on in-house help for copy, perhaps the firm should look outward to those who specialize in proofreading. The Teller recently learned about Proofreadnow.com, a company that specializes in making sure a business’ documents go out completely error proof. We don’t know how much this company or similar ones charge for their services, but The Teller is willing to bet that investing in this is something that NAI Hunneman won’t have to think twice about. Something they should have done before sending out that press release.
