At work, we use a VAR (Value Added Reseller) for support. They’re terrible. Anyway, for the umpteenth time, they’ve prematurely set an issue to ‘resolved’ status. I said, “Yo, WTF is up with you resolving my stuff that you haven’t resolved?” No, I was quite polite, which is a considerable effort considering their constant bumbling.
The response:
I appologize…
I make typos all the time. They frequently wind up in here. But if you rely on me for customer support, are you going to feel confident in my abilities if I can’t spell ‘apologize’?
But they’re providing technical support. Why do they need to know how to spell?
I don’t know. What if you’re running for a significant elected position? Pat McCrory’s staff can’t spell, but that shouldn’t disqualify him from running for Governer of North Carolina, should it?
Certainly I don’t think it should disqualify someone from running for office, especially since he explained candidly how the mistake was made. But maybe there should be some repercussions for his campaign manager, who lied about the mistake.
I was a tad harsh…
Upon further study of neurological conditions, I now conclude that it is premature to pass judgment on those prone to misspelling.
I recently had an epiphany and will no longer discriminate against bad spellers.
I will. 🙂 Part of it comes from enjoying the language. I didn’t used to feel that way, but I do now. And part of it comes from feeling like maybe others should occasionally put more work into spelling things correctly.
OTOH, English is hard to spell. And everyone makes mistakes, whether they’re typos while typing or not.
However, if someone simply can’t be bothered to look something up that they’re not sure about, and then inject that into a public forum (or worse, some private ones, like maybe even the customer service one you mention), then they should reconsider what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. I’ve sent probably tens of thousands of professional communications via e-mail, and I felt like if I mis-spelled something, it reflected badly on both me and my employer.
And yes, I’ve noticed my own horribly stupid typos later. I’ve even seen other people mis-spell their own name and not notice. Sometimes the proper response just has to be “D’oh!” 😉