I was going to write about the time I emailed my husband to tell him I had made out on the plane, but reading the stuff above, it seems pointless to bother. (okay, just this much of a mention…)
Nope.
We had an input file sent in the wrong format, it was supposed to be CSV but was instead sent as a position offset file. So the initial couple fields were all concatenated into one field and the rest ended up as various nonsense or skipped.
The first field was a record number which ended up as a 18 digit number rather than the 6 digit expected. Easy cleanup, no need to test just
DELETE from RECORD_TAB where RECORD_NO > 10000000;
into that night scripts.
Except I typed < instead of > and didn’t notice.
Deleted the entire table, except the corrupt records of course. :smack: hell of a cleanup on a production system the next morning.
Caught it before I sent it, but on a dating site (or really, anywhere) “I’d like to meet you” is very different than “I’d like to meat you”.
A friend of mine told me that her cousin died. I hit the 
emoticon instead of a 
I didn’t actually do it, it was done to me. When I was in college I was secretary of our NYPIRG chapter. NYPIRG stands for New York Public Interest Research Group. When it came time for our fund drive during registration time, we received our fliers and noticed one teeny, tiny little typo. They dropped the ‘L’ in the word “Public”. As we all sat far into the night hand inserting tiny little 'l’s into thousands of leaflets (we couldn’t afford to reprint them) one wag thought it would probably be easier and more fun if we just changed the focus of our group.
I have a tendency to pound on the keyboard, all thumbs, and make lots of mistakes. Sometimes I’ll throw in a csh history command like !r without being quite sure which r that is! It’s rather amazing that I’ve had so few disasters. The one I recall was more of a thinko than a typo. And once, under Windoze, I shook the mouse a bit, ended up with a misplaced folder, and did a re-install! 
The specific example based on rm lets me tell a funny story of which I’m the butt:
Once in a fit of caution I put ‘alias rm rm -i’ into my .cshrc. No more unexpected Rms for me. Meanwhile, in a fit of aliasophilia, I had ‘alias rc rm core’ or whatever it was to get rid of some pesky files that kept appearing out of nowhere. 
Guess what? Without even being conscious of it, I started writing rc wherever I used to type rm, just to get rid of that pesky -i !
Not worst in terms of consequences but most amusing was when I was in a text MUD. My character was a dwarf, a member of (naturally) the Dwarf Union and was called into a meeting of the officers. This was a small MUD and all of the positions at the top of the hierarchy were filled with NPCs which were to be replaced as players advanced enough to fill them.
Anyway, when she walked in, on the table were some metal buttons and the distinctive Union badge for the #2 position in the Union, all heavily tarnished. I typed:
Why isn’t Kagor wearing his badge, and why is it all tarnished?
“It was found in a pile of dragon dung,” was the reply.
“What!?” was what I intended but, “Shat!?” was what I typed, immediately followed by, “Erm, what?”
There was a pause of about a minute while, I’m sure everyone was laughing their ass off at their keyboards, then the reply came back, “You had it right the first time, Kin.”
Way back in the days of typewriters and long before computers I did a multi-page paper on Russian history and made reference to the Russian pheasants at one point. :smack:
When a writer hasn’t formulated a title, it’s customary for an editor or graphic artist to use “For Position Only” until the actual title comes in. More than once, over the years, has something gone to press entitled “For Position Only.”
And then there was the Presidents Day sale, in which we were goofing around and whited out Washington’s and Lincoln’s eyes, like Little Orphan Annie. Of course it got printed that way.
Not a typo, but a transcription error.
I was holding a public meeting that was being transcribed by a court reporter. I mentioned that some of the parameters my agency would consider for a public utility proposal was “markets, rates, and tariffs.”
The official transcript read “mark-ups, race, and terrorists.” Needless to say, the industry applicant was not pleased.
Native speakers of Egyptian Arabic who learn English as adults generally can’t hear the difference between a B and a P, so are apt to mix them up when writing English. This led to “crap soup” appearing on many menus, and “No barking” admonishments along the roadsides of Cairo.
Not me, but in a chatroom a decade or two ago, some people were poking fun at someone and she was like, okay, whatever, have at it, but she transposed the space and told them to “have a tit”.
Interesting. In Finnish, what sounds like a B is written as P. My dad used to say something that sounded like Buska hosa but it is actually spelled paskahousu. (It means shitty pants.)
The classic thread where Anastasaeon types a freudian slip.
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=294892&highlight=penis+ensues+olestra
I work in the construction industry.
We’ve removed the word “bride” from the spelling dictionaries, as too many folks were misspelling “bridge” in reports. And you don’t want to talk about the two-ton bride spanning the river.
One of the common ones is when building a building to check to make sure you haven’t typed “cat-in-place” instead of cast-in-place concrete. There are many humorous drawings illustrating that :).
A couple of others already mentioned it, but I also once left out the “o” in the word “count”. Mine was in a presentation to my VP and management team. When I got to that slide I quickly moved past the error once I noticed it, and acted like nothing happened. It was clearly a mistake, so no repercussions. I corrected it before sending them a copy. To this day, I avoid using the word in any form of communication, fearing a similar slip-up (in fact, I am checking my typing here before I post) - would be especially bad on an instant message or text where I am usually quick-fire typing/sending. The word just has red-flags for me now.
Similar thing, sending an email with my phone to someone I barely know professionally. Her name was Chinazom, and it got changed to China Zombie.
I’d wondered where that board meme had come from. It’s right up there with cow-orkers for me.
I just got an email from someone I barely know that started, “Hey Cow Girl!”
It took me a few minutes to realize they had used speech recognition software and said “Hey Carol!”