From bad to worse and into the doghouse.

I love Freud as much as the next person who studied psychology for more than twenty minutes (meaning, I have issues with Freud but regardless, he remains an icon). And just as the name ‘Google’ has become a verb (“Google it”) so has the name ‘Freud’ become a noun. Well, to be precise, it is really an adjective since the word ‘Freud’ is used to describe something (a slip) but many people drop the word ‘slip’ and say, “That was a Freudian” making it a noun.

I take you to my last post, which in just a few short minutes on a lazy Sunday afternoon has caused me significant grief.

Let’s backtrack. I am a lousy typist. There. It’s out. No one will be seeking my services as a secretary. Do they even exist anymore or have they gone the way of the telephone operator?

Many of my posts also appear in the Budapest Times, a newspaper that has yet to achieve global circulation, hence many I post here on the world wide web. (It’s a distribution thing.)

The last article (for those who missed it) was about the need/desire young Hungarians have to go outside Hungary’s borders if they hope to be successful and be paid more than minimum wage even as a brain surgeon.

The article referenced a few cities in Canada: Edmonton (important factoid: Edmonton is the hometown of my editor at the Budapest Times), Thunder Bay, a city so unattractive it could pass for a town in the former Soviet Union and Hamilton, Ontario, a steel mill town and a town where many Hungarians have emigrated.

For the article, I found an ugly picture of Hamilton because it was quick and easy to do so. I recommended this image to my editor but being an Edmonton boy and one with a quirky sense of humour, he found a picture of two scantily-clad Edmonton young women protesting the fur industry to use instead. This is relevant because Edmonton was founded on fur trade, a profitable British enterprise back then once they could no longer skin Americans with taxes. So the scantily-clad women went into the article.

When posting the article on my site, I hummed and hawed about which image to use.  After much deliberation,  I thought I might as well be consistent with the Budapest Times article. That way, for the two people on the planet who happen to see both, the articles would be the same.

This where Freud reared his stern-looking head. As a rule, I cut and paste the article into the WordPress post and type in the headline. (See reference above about secretarial skills.) I put in the tags, categories and all that good search-engine friendly stuff and hit the “publish’ button knowing that every time, WordPress’ spell-check and grammar algorithm has some issue with something; most often British spelling which is weird because why do you think we call the language “English”? Same happened in this case. I hit the ‘publish’ button and up came the dialogue box telling me WordPress had found issues and did I want to correct them? I always double check (just because) and after I made one change to the body copy, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that I had a typo in the headline. There are some typos even Workpress can’t catch and that is when the typo turns one legitimate mistyped word into a legitimate word which is out of context. So you can image my relief when I caught the mistake. I had missed the letter ‘s’ when I typed ‘west’ turning the word into ‘wet’. Whew! Glad I caught that one! But as I went to click on the headline box…whoosh..out went the article. Out to Linkedin. Out to Facebook. Out to all those very public places. Out there with an image I didn’t want to use in the first place of two young women in bikini bottoms holding a sign protesting the fur industry in front of their chests, and a headline reading “Go wet young Hun”. Not good. In fact, bad. About the only thing that could have made it worse would have been if I made two typos and the headline read, “Go wet young Hung”.

I was quickly placed in the doghouse.

This, then, is probably one of the longest ‘errors and omissions’ notices on record. For those who missed this the first time, too bad. Go to the post and you’ll find an ugly picture of Hamilton. If you want to see the picture of the young women, you’ll have to go to the Budapest Times’ site.