Another case of mistaken identity

[ffutures]

This afternoon someone working for a British personnel recruitment company emailed me the names, phone numbers, and email addresses of about a hundred people working for his company in another country. Needless to say I had no idea why, when I queried it I was told that

"You are right, I got the email address wrong. My Marcus has an A in the middle of the day, something I missed."

I'm still trying to work out what the hell he thought he was saying, and can only assume that it was a very liquid lunch. Since I am not a particularly malevolent person I manfully did not post it to every email address on the list, and have just permanently deleted it to avoid temptation...

Don't think this had anything to do with any of the other Marcus Rowlands I'm aware of - the film guy who appears to be fairly important in the industry but doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry, an American athlete, and so forth.

Comments

[julesjones]

He may using speech recognition on a phone and not proof-reading -- that looks suspiciously like someone saying "in the middle of the name" and the phone hearing something else. (Even a well trained copy of Dragon on a full computer does that sort of thing occasionally, and I've seen some hilarious results from phones.)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought of speech recognition but it does make sense.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

Try the site Damn You Autocorrect for some of the perils of speech recognition software: http://www.damnyouautocorrect.com/

I particular like one a few months ago where the text, in the middle of a discussion of the sales figures for the previous year there is the phrase, "Don't bite, bad." When queried why he said that, he replied he was using speech recognition at home and his cat had just attacked him.