Listening 36 – Listen for specific words

Today I’m going to tell you about two memorable mistakes I’ve made. The first one happened when I was living in New York City and working in . We had one project where we were making a cover for a DVD which was of a debate between two speakers, so we had to get from both of them on the design.

Well, there were a lot of and changes, and the whole thing just dragged on and on until we were right up against the deadline. So when the designer sent me the final draft late one , I checked it over, it all looked good, and I approved it for printing.

The problem was that I had to run it by the speakers who were featured in the DVD, and I later got an e-mail from one of them that some details be changed in his bio. I tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t budge. By that point a couple DVD covers had already been printed – and we had to throw them away and print them all over again after making the changes.

It was my fault, I should have the procedure – and it really bugs me when I make a mistake on something where I feel like I should’ve known . But I was also worried because I was pretty new on the job – I had only been there a couple of – and here I was making a mistake that actually cost the company money. So I was even if I’d lose my job over it.

I called my and she really helped put things in perspective. She pointed out that nobody got hurt, nobody got killed, and it’s not like it would cause any permanent to the company’s reputation. And luckily they didn’t fire me, my manager just said, “Don’t let it happen again!”

The second mistake is funny in hindsight, but seemed like a disaster at the time. I was working for a organization, and we were going to send an e-mail to about 20,000 pastors across the country offering to give a in their churches. I wrote a draft of the e-mail and sent it to the program manager for her to review. She said it was , and so I sent it to the director of publications, too – and she also approved it. So I clicked “send” and the message went out.

Within hours we discovered that there was a typo in the phone number, which we had asked the pastors to call in order to a presentation. Two of the numbers were switched, so instead of 5784 it said 5874 or something like that. Both the manager and the director had looked at it and given the green light, and of us thought to check the phone number.

Well, it wouldn’t have been so bad if the wrong number went to somebody’s , or to a pizza delivery place or something… but unfortunately it led straight to a phone sex line, and we had just sent it out to thousands and thousands of religious and encouraged them to call!

So after a few panicked messages back and forth, we to send out another email with the subject line, “We made a big mistake!” and giving the correct phone number. What’s is that more people actually opened the second e-mail than the first one – so all in all, no lasting harm was done.