It was all fun and games before we noticed the typos

There’s a moment after you receive newly printed documents here when your heart sinks as you notice a typo.

“I could have sworn I checked and double checked that,” you say to yourself.

Then you see another, then another, then another.

“How could I….” you start, before you realise you hadn’t missed these mistakes, someone has re-keyed in all your words and got them wrong.

It happened on several occasions while we were readying signage and menus for the new Cart. I found nearly 20 spelling mistakes on the menu signage.

When I asked a friend, who’d worked locally in the hospitality industry, if it had happened to him he replied: “Every single menu we ever had printed”.

Like us he always sent over the computer files with the instructions just to print it as is.  Every time they re-keyed it with added mistakes.

“One time,” he said, “I stood over them and watched them re-key it while all the time they were telling me they don’t do that”.

Cutting corners I can understand.  But this seems like making extra work for yourself while also ensuring the end product is of no use whatsoever. Though obviously we’re missing something.

The obvious answer is we are sending it in the wrong format.  But with one sign they finally relented and gave us our original computer file blown up as we asked for – and it was perfect.

And if the file was really wrong then why not ask for it in another format?  Or at the very least why not cut and paste the words from one file to another?

It’s a common experience and no one appears to have come up with a reason why it happens.  And this wasn’t something lost in translation – this was Vietnamese to Vietnamese with my wife making the arrangements

Also in this area, see printers of passport photos that airbrush out distinguishing features.

A passport photo without distinguishing features is really missing the point.