One of my favourite examples of a technical writing disaster is fictional, but very funny: in the fake rock documentary This Is Spinal Tap, the guitarist’s plans for a Stonehenge stage set are written perfectly, but he uses quotation marks (for inches) instead of the single apostrophe for the measurements in feet that he actually meant. Cue cowled figures dancing around what looks like a tiny garden ornament.
Unfortunately, real-world examples aren’t quite so entertaining, as the ‘million-dollar comma’ case (see the next section) demonstrates. I’m presenting these as confidence boosters: everybody makes mistakes – that’s why reviewing and editing is so important – but I bet you won’t make mistakes as devastating as these.
The million-dollar comma case hinged on a single punctuation mark. Canadian telecoms firm Bell Aliant had a five-year deal with cable TV firm Rogers Communications to let the latter use its telegraph poles, but it cancelled the contract after a year. Rogers claimed that the cancellation was illegal and would cost it 1 million Canadian dollars; Bell Aliant argued that the position of a comma in one clause of the 14-page contract clearly meant it could cancel the deal after one year and not five.
This was the sentence in question.20
This agreement shall be effective from the date it is made and shall continue in force for a period of five (5) years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five (5) year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.
The argument was over that second comma before ‘unless and until terminated’. The sentence was intended to say that the contract would be in place for five years, and after that the contract could be terminated with one year’s notice. But Bell Aliant argued that the comma clearly meant that the contract could be terminated with one year’s notice at any time, not just after five years.
Rogers eventually won the case, but it was a hollow victory. The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission said that while Rogers was the injured party the Commission had no jurisdiction over power poles, so it couldn’t do anything about the money Rogers claimed to have lost.
More recently, the case of O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy in Maine, USA in 2017 hinged on another single comma.21 By law, firms in Maine have to pay overtime to anybody that works more than 40 hours per week. However, there’s an exception in the case of perishable products that have to be processed while they’re still fresh. The law says that means no overtime for ‘the canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution’ of meat, fish and other perishable products.
The case hinged on ‘packing for shipment or distribution’. The drivers said that it clearly meant packing for distribution, not the actual distribution, so therefore the drivers should be paid overtime. The dairy said that the law clearly listed ‘packing for shipment’ separately from ‘distribution’, so therefore the drivers shouldn’t be paid overtime.
After a lot of time and a lot of legal fees, a US court of appeals found in the drivers’ favour. They haven’t won at the time of writing, but they’re free to take their case to another court. If they win, the dairy will have to cough up a whopping $10 million in wages.
What these examples demonstrate is that punctuation isn’t trivial. Had the legal advice in the Maine dairy case finished with ‘packing for shipment, or distribution’ then the writer might not have cost the dairy $10 million.
THE CONVERSION THAT COST A SPACESHIP
In 1998, NASA’s Climate Orbiter spacecraft was lost in space after going too close to Mars. It turned out that different teams within NASA were using different measurements, with one team using metric measurements and the other imperial; the result was the loss of a craft worth $125 million and the data it was sent to gather.22
In 2009, a firm called Taylor & Son Ltd went into administration in England. Unfortunately, it was entered into the Companies House database as Taylor & Sons Ltd, a completely different firm. Within three weeks the 124-year-old Taylor & Sons was forced into bankruptcy as 3,000 suppliers cancelled their contracts with what they believed to be a company about to be liquidated. The typo cost Companies House millions in legal bills, but that was little comfort to the 250 people who lost their jobs.23
The now-defunct Banner Travel Services, a California travel agent, sued Yellow Pages for $18 million after it was wrongly listed as a specialist in ‘erotic’ destinations: the listing should have said ‘exotic’. Banner claimed the typo lost it 80 per cent of its regular customers.24
If you thought the million-dollar comma was bad, in 1999 aerospace giant Lockheed Martin lost a whopping $70 million (around £52 million) because it put a comma in the wrong place in a formula – an error of just one decimal point – in a sales contract.25
20 See www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/business/worldbusiness/25comma.html
21 See www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-few-words-about-that-ten-million-dollar-serial-comma
22 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
23 See www.theguardian.com/law/shortcuts/2015/jan/28/typo-how-one-mistake-killed-a-family-business-taylor-and-sons