We've all been there, or had nightmares of it: sending out the unintended email or a document with unintended content. However even in our nightmares we generally don't create financial calamity. Unfortunately the "Office of Thrift Supervision" (the government nanny "supervising" failed financial institutions) isn't so lucky.
It wasn't the same as shouting "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater, but an apparent text-editing foul-up by banking regulators was about the last thing a small Pittsburgh thrift needed prior to its seizure Friday.
Two weeks before the Office of Thrift Supervision swooped in and
closed Dwelling House Savings & Loan Association, agency officials
emailed a press release announcing the failure of an Ohio bank. There
was a clear problem with the release, though: Two sentences about also
closing Dwelling House appeared in the same document, blaring in
bright-red type with cross-out lines through the still-visible words.
Ouch. Let that be a lesson: accept all revisions, turn off revision tracking, or better yet convert a live document to Adobe PDF before distributing.