The Dummy of The Year Award

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It has been quite a while since the last time I have done something truly silly.

On Friday the final book from my Waterstone’s order arrived. I heard about it years ago, and I was curious to read it myself - Stephen King’s “Pet Cemetary”.

The big surprise was revealed when I took the book out of the envelope. I looked at the title, and something seemed wrong, and then I realized it spelt “Pet Sematary”… Odd, so I turn the book over, and the text on the back cover is not in English.

At first I thought that maybe it was some sort of a mistake. I couldn’t have ordered the book in Italian, could I? Well it turned out I could…

I went to check my order history on the Waterstone’s website, and in the order the title was as I thought - “Pet Cemetary”. OK, let’s check the book description page. And there it was!

You can play spot the language yourself.

The problem seems to be that on a UK website with and English title, I wasn’t really expecting to book to be in any other language than the “default” English. And personally I think it should be a lot more prominent  that is is a foreign edition. Especially considering there is no cover shot available…

At the end of the day it is my fault, and I deserve the Dummy of The year Award fully, but still, I can’t help thinking that the mistake could have been avoided had the language information been clearer.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 14th, 2009 at 9:30 am and is filed under Anecdotes . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “The Dummy of The Year Award”

  • Dave Hambidge Says:
    March 15th, 2009 at 4:07 am

    An error easily made, ma’am. A few months ago my wife was doing an online grocery shopping order. When it arrived it contained a single apple in a plastic bag. Where is the rest we asked. Copy of order clearly showed ‘1′ rather than the ‘1 bag’ we thought. Heyho, good laugh followed.

  • Joanna Says:
    March 15th, 2009 at 9:49 am

    Good one, love the apple story, the staff must have been quite puzzled when packing your order ;)
    Luckily for me it turns out Waterstone’s have a 21 return policy, so I got a full refund. :)

  • Chris Says:
    March 16th, 2009 at 3:34 pm

    Oh wow, that sucks. Surely not the dummy of the year though, maybe the day. lol.

  • Joanna Says:
    March 16th, 2009 at 3:52 pm

    I guess it was the silliest thing this year so far ;) There’s still a while to go, so I might turn out to be a bigger goofball ;)

  • Kasia Says:
    March 19th, 2009 at 6:57 am

    LOL! that’s just lame ;D
    Btw, when you get the proper book - it’s really cool! I loved it!

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