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You know that when other people do stupid things, I have absolutely no problem saying what I think about it. But I’m a generally fair person. Because of that, and since I’m only human myself, I’m going to share my own recent lapse in brilliance with you and how it ended up costing me money (not a huge amount, but still — it’s the principle of it).

As you might remember, I hired a guy to program a word count tracker that will be released this week. I was concerned when I didn’t get an update from him earlier in the week so I sent him a message (or at least I thought I did). Instead, I accidentally was repsonding (a few times) to a message from another programmer who had sent a quote for the project over. Oops!

So I confused the hell out of poor guy who was already told I’d hired someone else. He went ahead and rushed out the job for me so I’d have it before release time (good guy).

Boy did I feel stupid when I realized the mistake — I had two people working on the same project.

Moral of the story? Everyone makes a boo boo every now and then. Fortunately everyone also has an opportunity to admit and correct their mistakes before they end up wasting even more time or money due to a lousy business call.

In this case, I was lucky. The second guy did an outstanding job and we’ll have an even more feature-rich tracker this week than I expected.   Both programmers are being paid for their effort since the error was entirely mine, and you benefit by having two options to choose from when they’re released. It worked out in the end, but you better believe I’m going to be more careful about what I’m sending to who moving forward, no matter how busy or stressed I might be on any given day!

EDIT: And while typing this, I caught myself using BBCode in Wordpress — Ohhh, it’s going to be a long day!

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About the Author: Jennifer Mattern

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Jenn is a professional blogger and freelance business writer. She has worked as a freelance writer since 1999, and has been an active business and niche blogger since 2004. She owns All Freelance Writing as well as several other sites and blogs covering PR, small business, and related topic areas. She is also currently writing a nonfiction book for freelance writers called The Query-Free Freelancer, and is the author of the Web Writer's Guide e-book series.

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TAGS: duh, tracker, word count tracker, wordcount tracker