I am a journalist, and I run my own small company. We provide a range of services, which include producing news and feature articles for the press, commissioned and speculative photography, stock library work, syndication sales and PR consultancy and services.
In 1997 I had my office assistant establish a database of all of our pictures, published stories, client's pieces, etc., etc. This database covered from 1988 to present and was then to be updated on a rolling basis.
It was only over Christmas last, when he- and everyone else- was on holiday and I needed to find something quickly, that the true horror became evident. You see, when he was here, anyone needing something would just say "Could you dig out that stuff on the Prime Minister's visit last year," or "Such and such a company needs all we've got on salmon fishing," or something like that, and lo and behold, it would appear.
It turned out that this was because the young man in question was a consistent abuser of the English language who always made the same mistakes. (We are talking about an educated lad here.) And because not everything was misspelled, no one had picked up on it before. It was just that I knew I'd written a piece- with pix- on a certain subject, and when I could not find it I became concerned and did a thorough investigation.
Of course, the fact that the whole system was shot through with spelling errors meant that the database was unusable for anyone restricted to standard English. This was an expensive mistake to rectify, believe me; a spell checker fixed the easy parts, but we're still going through the actual files manually checking the spelling there and correcting it. Most of the stock picture library, for example, is held on CD-ROM, so that means one mistake and the whole perishing thing has to be redone. Argh.
It's fair to say that the already considerable amount of work involved in setting up our digital archive was doubled by this lad's carelessness.
It has also delayed the launch of our Website by at least three months as we have had to fit in the repair work between other jobs. I for one am not about to put a collection of misspelled gobbledygook up in cyberspace with my company's name on it!
That assistant is no longer with us; I was sad to let him go, but the fact was that he'd been told to use a spell checker when setting up the database and the archive, which he clearly had not done. This had to be added to a significant number of other occasions where he "thought he knew better", and the time had come to call a halt.
As an aside, I now pay close attention to the spelling ability of applicants for jobs here, and I have to say I have found this to be a pretty depressing exercise. I don't know what the situation is like in Oz or the US, but here it seems that very few people under the age of 30 can spell. And as I say, we're not talking about thickos.