
'My life was ruined by a typo' - petercooper
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39328853
======
yeukhon
I was recently hospitlized. The EMT took my id card and entered my name
incorrectly (YUEK as opposed to YEUK). I told the nurse and she said there is
nothing she can do about it until I check out the hospital.

I waited until I checked out the hospital, and the nurse took my information
down. For my situation, I have to follow up with specialist. The clinic
received my medical information and the referral from the hospital. The clinic
also got the typo from the hospital, plus the wrong insurance information, as
well as the wrong cell phone number. I was amazed at the wrong insurance
(hospital gave them my dental insurance, but I received a notice from my
health insurance regarding my hospital admission before I visited the clinic).
How funny. When I went back to confirm my appointment a few days later, the
clinic said no one correct my name (wtf?).

What a joke. While I was getting admitted into the hospital for a few nights,
the nurses had to pair up in order to figure out how to enter data into the
system. The program looks like Excel except it isn't. In some cases you have
to enter the data in a different column, in some cases you have to enter 0, in
some cases you leave it out. The nurses kept saying "oh I remember you have to
do this to get around this issue, oh I think you can ignore this option."

When I met with the nurse practitioner the next day, he couldn't log into his
system. I told him I work as a DevOps and he was curious about my role. Then
he said he has to call the IT support (managed solution) somewhere in
Tennessee and all the vendor would say is try again later). Yeah, after
meeting 30 minutes he was able to login.

Here is the thing - typo can ruin life, typo can take away money and time for
fixing error, can cause divorce and all sorts of other bad things. Insurance,
Social Security, government IDs, Diploma, etc.

There is no reason, in my funny but pretty frustrating anecdote, for hospital
to run so inefficient, relying on systems built by incompetent people, product
dedicated by policy makers or administrators who really are out of touch with
real life (they don't use the system).

You know, I am angry, I want to reform hospital software system.

~~~
cyberferret
I am amazed that a lot of systems don't allow changing of information once
entered. I signed up with a new ISP a couple of years ago - one of the biggest
ISPs in Australia, and during the phone conversation to set up my plan, the
operator heard my first name wrong, substituting a 'v' with a 'b'. I didn't
realise during the call (because, well, it IS hard to pick up that nuance
audibly) until they sent me my sign on links which of course had the typo in
my username. Billing information is also all wrong.

When I told them about it, their response was pretty much "Oh, too bad - once
that username is created, it is there for life. You will have to shut down
that account and create a new one", meaning I lose all the benefits I got from
the promotional transfer.

So I just put up with a wrong first name whenever I sign on or ask for support
from them. I still think it is strange that some second or third level support
engineer can't just change that info in the database for me, after the proper
authentication. I can't believe that something so easy to _create_ over the
phone can be so hard to change over the phone.

~~~
traviscj
If this is the type of error you want to minimize, NATO phonetic alphabet [1]
is worth learning. (Amateur radio is a good place to practice, though I'll
admit I'm a bit rusty.)

I actually kinda enjoy these minor discrepancies, because it exposes who has
sold my customer data and to whom -- though I've never gone as far as giving
anyone intentionally incorrect data with this purpose in mind. I remember my
parents also being amused with these copied mistakes, and with greater
frequency. Seems plausible that the error rate goes down when most of my
utilities/accounts were self-created online instead of typed in from a
handwritten form or during an onboarding phonecall.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet)

~~~
viraptor
Even with a phonetic alphabet, you can still run into issues. Some people are
just surprised when they hear it. "P for Papa" / "was that P as in Patrick?"
Sigh... I'm seriously considering changing my surname to something that's
trivial to understand in English.

~~~
kaishiro
Man, my surname is a basic color and people still get it wrong sometimes.

~~~
mrSugar
Well, #00ff00 could be difficult to dictate over the phone... :-)

------
arjie
Classic Police.

Get the IP wrong. IP maps to one person's account. Arrest a different person
at the same address. When asked, don't admit the reason for release until
forced to do so many years later.

Mistakes happen, but this is brilliantly compounding incompetence.

Imagine a plane crash that goes: the left engine wasn't maintained, the pilot
was drunk, and there was less fuel than there should have been.

If you look back at the event, you don't conclude that those things followed
from each other. They're probably independent.

What that means is that less egregious failures are probably happening all the
time.

In this case, it probably means that this police department routinely arrests
the wrong person after finding out which account belongs to a suspect. It also
means that they routinely deny information of their wrongdoing. And it
probably unsurprisingly means that they typo things all the time.

I wonder what actions they took. It's not about firing people. It's about
making sure policy doesn't lead to poor outcomes.

~~~
MichaelMoser123
If they have to type the IP address by hand then he was probably not the only
person who did time for a typo... Thank goodness they have ipv4 addresses,
with ipv6 you would get more typos.

~~~
skygazer
Overwhelming chances are that if you mistype an ipv6 address, it points to
somewhere nonexistent. That sounds preferable.

------
Udik
I read this bracing myself for the usual kafkaesque story of somebody jailed
for months or years on a groundless charge, going through endless sloppy
trials, hysterical sentencing, and the predictable tragic consequences on
career, relations, together with the trauma and abuse of being jailed.

But this case happened in the UK, not the US. After he was "arrested" this man
appears to have spent a grand total of three weeks "living with his mother".
After these three weeks, his laptop was returned to him by the police and he
had been cleared from all charges. However, he laments that "because of what
happened" he's suffering of PTSD and he's unable to go back to work. That
during the three weeks he was away, his younger son would cry. That the £60k
compensation he received from the police for the mistake it's not enough,
since he "didn't even get two and a half years' wage". That he hasn't had his
day in court, and he needs the world to know he's not a paedophile. The events
happened six years ago.

I might be underestimating the impact on one's life and mental health of this
kind of things. But this story smells of trying to get a better deal or of
some deeper personal issue.

~~~
macintux
When you work with troubled youth, an accusation of child pornography is
almost as bad as it can possibly be. Since the police didn't give him an
explanation for the mistake up front, I'm sure he lived under a cloud of
suspicion after that, hence the concern about being alone with young women.

For 3 weeks everyone around you assumes you're guilty. How do you prove the
absence of pornography in your life when the police have all your equipment?

Yes, it could have been much worse. No, I'm not shocked that it was
devastating.

(Update: forgot to add, I imagine there's a very real fear during those three
weeks that you'll be permanently separated from your children.)

~~~
Udik
Ok, but the police cleared him of the charges. Then he hired a solicitor and
thanks to him the mistake was made clear, and he got a totally justified, and
very handsome, compensation. One would think that this should be enough to put
at rest any possible suspicion. Three weeks are not such a long ordeal,
especially when you know from the start it's all a mistake.

~~~
nikanj
If you pay any attention to the news, there's been numerous cases where
innocent people spent years or even decades in jails before they were found
not guilty.

~~~
emodendroket
I guess this is related to the thread where a bunch of HN users said they
stopped reading news altogether.

------
zczc
Reminds me of Tuttle/Buttle mishap in Terry Gilliam's Brazil movie. Life
imitates (dystopian) art.

~~~
threepipeproblm
Ha I came here to say this when there was only 1 comment on the page, and you
beat me to it. Great movie... too bad we're actually living in it?

~~~
dredmorbius
I posted the scene to a discussion of this elsewhere. From the no-knock
warrant to mistaken identity to the bureaucratic nightmare to the utterly
inadequate redress, Gilliam hit this square on the head.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nWbIxFKtTmE](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nWbIxFKtTmE)

~~~
RantyDave
Terry Gilliam moved to England as an adult. England is _knee deep_ in
bureaucratic stuff ups and Brazil was practically a documentary. All he did
was change the scenery.

~~~
threepipeproblm
To be fair, he also added in a level of tube-based technology that was beyond
what was available to consumers of the day. ;)

------
saboot
Related story: The leak of John Podesta's (Hillary Clinton's campaign manager)
emails was caused by their IT support person replying that a phishing email
was 'legitimate' when intending to type 'illegitimate', a very serious typo!

~~~
lawnchair_larry
So they claim. I don't think he would have used illegitimate in that context.
He probably just said it was a typo to save face.

~~~
kafkaesq
Oh, I can totally believe it was a typo. People who work on campaigns are
constantly overworked and sleep-deprived like you wouldn't believe. So they
make screw-ups like this all the time.

~~~
ronilan
It depends upon what the meaning of the word _" was"_ was.

[https://youtu.be/j4XT-l-_3y0](https://youtu.be/j4XT-l-_3y0)

------
UnoriginalGuy
An interesting aspect of this story that nobody else picked up on:

> The IP address passed on corresponded to an internet account held by Nigel's
> partner. But it had been typed incorrectly, with an extra digit added by
> mistake.

So he himself wasn't even the owner of that account. He just happened to have
been living in his partner's home. So, why specifically was he targeted even
with the wrong IP?

Is this what law enforcement has become? Rounding up the first male of age in
the vicinity of a crime? I'm just saying, not only did they have the wrong
home but even then they had absolutely no basis even within that home (since
obviously no evidence was found during the search), but his life was
absolutely ruined.

~~~
DanBC
This particular crime is overwhelmingly committed by men.

------
underyx
>South Yorkshire Police were informed by colleagues in Hertfordshire that they
had identified an IP address from which more than 100 indecent images of
children had been shared in April that year. The IP address passed on
corresponded to an internet account held by Nigel's partner. But it had been
typed incorrectly, with an extra digit added by mistake.

Here's the reason, for anyone else having difficulty to find it.

~~~
xenadu02
The story needlessly confuses the issue of the wrong IP address with the fact
that his _actual_ internet account was owned by his partner. The two have
nothing to do with each other.

The real IP the police were after belonged to someone else living in a
different house.

~~~
sushid
I believe he accused them of racism and sexism since he was raided by the
police for being a suspected pedophile whereas his white female partner was
not even investigated as a potential criminal.

~~~
9q
I don't think there is any evidence of it being racist. It juts seems more
like incompetence to me.

Him being male would probably be more relevant, but it's far more likely for
men to commit this crime either way, so it's not reasonable to suspect him
more highly.

~~~
MertsA
Him being black would probably be more relevant, but it's far more likely for
black people to commit this crime either way, so it's not reasonable to
suspect him more highly.

This is why it's wrong to just blindly rely on statistics to tell you who to
arrest. Prejudice has no place in law enforcement.

------
mastazi
He received £60,000. Even adding one more zero wouldn't be enough in my
opinion.

~~~
sundvor
Hell yes. This makes my blood boil. Anything less than a _£6m payout_ would be
too small.

It might actually put the police on notice as well, i.e. properly incentivise
them to do higher quality work.

~~~
anigbrowl
The police don't care what the taxpayers have to shell out, it just means
sitting through some angry lectures but basically they are no worse. I think
compensation for victims of police misconduct should come out of police
pensions.

~~~
tspiteri
If police officers are liable to pay the victims, would anyone want to be a
police officer, given their relatively low wages? In order to make them liable
for such things, you would have to increase their wages _a lot_. I think one
of the problems is that we expect a lot from the police, which we should, but
then they are not paid nearly enough for that level of responsibility.

~~~
anigbrowl
Conversely, why would I want anyone to be a police officer that had a problem
with this? True, a police officer could be innocent and run into some problems
anyway - which is the situation faced by everyone else. I'd certainly be in
favor of raising pay if it attracted a higher calibre of applicant, but the
pay shouldn't be so high that it becomes economically attractive to take risks
with others' life and liberty.

Lots of police officers are reasonable people trying to do a difficult job
with integrity. but the job also attracts a lot of bad people who exploit
their authority abuse or kill people, and there are types of politician and
voter who support that kind of behavior and choose to advance it.

------
uptownfunk
I'm sorry to say, but this is absolutely disgusting. How horrifying for that
poor man. Hope he gets his fight back, there just needs to be more severe
penalties for mistreatment like this. This is a totally different scenario but
reminds me when police kill someone they think has a weapon but is just
holding a toy, or when police kill someone that looks like a criminal they're
looking for. The sad outcome is most of the time they get off scott free...

~~~
ghaff
>there just needs to be more severe penalties for mistreatment like this.

So, what should these severe penalties be? When someone makes a data entry
mistake that's corrected (as in this case), should they lose their job? Maybe
be thrown in prison for a few years? I imagine dealing with programming errors
like this would serve as some pretty effective encouragement for better
practices. Of course, people might simply choose to avoid any actions that
could result in errors.

~~~
JohnGB
In this case, the police refused to give him any information after the fact,
forcing him to hire a lawyer. The police only apologised after a lawyer got
involved, not after they realised that they had arrested the wrong man.
Additionally only having an IP address to go on, they chose to arrest him (I'm
assuming because he's a man) rather than the person whose name was on the
account.

So, the penalty shouldn't be for a mistake. The penalty should be for trying
to cover up the mistake over years, and for profiling him based on zero
supporting evidence.

------
prohor
In Poland there were many people killed, potentially due to a coma (,). A
court process of the pacification of Wujek [1] was mainly whether a response
to question "Should we shoot?" was "No, wait for orders" or "Don't wait for
orders" (in Polish less difference "Nie, czekajcie na razkaz" vs. "Nie
czekajcie na rozkaz"). This was really a ruining life of many just by one
coma.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacification_of_Wujek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacification_of_Wujek)

~~~
LoSboccacc
I'm learning polish and every sentence is basically one letter away from
disaster.

~~~
jungletek
Not sure if clever joke, or irony.

(The lower-case 'P' in Polish)

------
WhitneyLand
With the going rate of accountability for these things I think he made out ok
with 60k and an apology. Not that I want the deal, but with prosecutorial
immunity, and innocent people getting nothing after decades in prison it's all
relative.

------
userbinator
... and somewhere out there is a lucky pedophile thinking 'my life was saved
by a typo'.

Errors don't always mean the bad guy wins, however:

[http://staugustine.com/news/local-news/2011-09-10/elise-
okan...](http://staugustine.com/news/local-news/2011-09-10/elise-okane-gets-
saved-typo)

------
MichaelMoser123
Reminds me of the story of a poor editor during Stalin's terror who was shot
for omitting a letter : instead of 'commander in chief' he had a typo that
read 'commander in shit' (главнокомандующий/гавнокомандующий)

------
btschaegg
Only reading the headline was enough to remind me of Brazil[1]. The movie,
while being based on the very premise of a typo ruining lifes, also has the
most telling lines in it - the one everybody trying to rectifiy such an issue
is bound to get told[2]:

    
    
      Mistake? We don't make mistakes!
    

[1]:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_\(1985_film\))

[2]: [https://youtu.be/6OalIW1yL-k](https://youtu.be/6OalIW1yL-k)

------
rdiddly
What the article doesn't say (didn't watch any video, so kick me please if
need be), is whether the police ever caught the guy they were actually looking
for, at the _actual_ IP address.

~~~
linuxkerneldev
This is a very good point. There seems to be no coverage of whether the actual
perpetrator was ever caught.

We employ and compensate the police, admins and fund the judicial system, at
least partly in order to serve as a deterrent to criminals. If our system has
a high percentage of false positives or punishes innocent people then that
reduces the efficacy of the system as a deterrent.

I'm reminded of this exchange between a journalist and a British justice
minister where the minister seems incapable of understanding that punishing
people who turned out to be innocent isn't an effective system.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DrsVhzbLzU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DrsVhzbLzU)

------
justAlittleCom
In France we have a ISP (Numericable) who had a shitty system to map the IP to
the user. Each time the system didn't found the person, he didn't return an
error but, someone, always the same dude. Poor dude…
[https://www.cnil.fr/fr/avertissement-public-nc-
numericable-p...](https://www.cnil.fr/fr/avertissement-public-nc-numericable-
pour-erreur-dans-la-transmission-de-donnees-didentification-sur)

~~~
forgottenpass
There are similar problems with geolocation databases:

[http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-
kansa...](http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/)

------
DanielBMarkham
_Following Hertfordshire Police 's admission, Nigel sought compensation for a
breach of the Data Protection Act 1998, false imprisonment, police
assault/battery, and trespass by police...In October 2016, Hertfordshire
Police settled out of court. Nigel received damages of £60,000, plus legal
costs..."It isn't enough money," Nigel says, "but after six years of fighting,
you're tired."_

That sucks, big time.

It is also true that combative lawsuits actually _increase_ the problem,
making it more and more unlikely that anybody will voluntarily admit mistakes.
So if you're some police clerk and you mis-type an IP address and somebody's
life gets ruined, best circle the wagons and keep your mouth shut. Maybe --
maybe -- you could help the poor schmuck get exonerated, but you'd have to be
really careful about how you do it.

I hate that, but that is how large systems of people operate. It quite quickly
becomes "us versus them"

There's another aspect to this story that I don't think people discuss enough:
for many topics, both law enforcement and the general public are either
completely disinterested or want to burn you at the stake. There doesn't seem
to be much middle ground or nuance.

Have a picture of child porn on your computer? There are folks who argue that
not only should you be imprisoned, but that you should never be released. Are
you 20 and dating a 17-year-old? People say that's the same thing. Are you a a
teenager and send a naked picture of yourself to a friend? You could very well
be a child pornographer.

This, by any definition of the word, is insane.

And it's worse than that. Sexual harassment is such a bad thing that for many
folks, there doesn't even have to be any evidence of it. As long as one person
says that another person sexually harassed them? Somebody needs to be fired.
Somebody should go to jail. There are even those folks that based on a story
that one person types on the internet will say "This other person? They're a
sexual predator" \-- it's the grown-up version of kiddie porn. You're either
completely innocent of everything or you're the fucking Evil One incarnate.
Once again, insane.

I have no answers, but I do observe that when this type of over-reaction to
any kind of perceived crime happens in a small village, it's not such a big
deal. Some small social groups have social norms that vary quite a bit, and
over time they influence one another. I am reminded that the Salem Witch
trials ended when, in part, folks in the biggest nearby town asked something
like "How could there be so many witches in Salem and none here? How does that
make sense?"

What we're seeing now is a village-ization of the world. There are people who
want only _one_ social group, across the planet, and they want it to have the
same norms. That's fantastically fucked up, but I don't think the people doing
it have any idea of that. Folks like Nigel are just collateral damage in this
mission of theirs.

------
mirimir
I wonder where they got that IP address from.

Could this be another Freenet case?

------
bshimmin
I can relate: a good part of my morning was ruined by typing "RAILS_ENv"
instead of "RAILS_ENV"...

~~~
WhitneyLand
Someone's life is ruined, and he is shamed in the most unjust way possible,
and in your mind it merits a coding joke?

Sorry, I just don't understand.

~~~
bshimmin
You're right, it was in really poor taste. I'm sorry. The downvotes are
entirely justified.

(As a poor attempt at mitigation, I had literally just made that typo, which
cost me about two hours because I'd run a lengthy migration on the wrong
database in a staging environment and then not understood why nothing I tested
was working, when I read the BBC News article... and, yes, I thought, "Hey,
yeah, me too.")

~~~
WhitneyLand
Thank you for your honesty and reflection.

------
scrumper
So not NATted IP? Not sure I understand how a typo in the IP could point to
someone at the same residence.

And without excusing police conduct or eliding his real distress, I'd also
point out that his life was perhaps also ruined by having a peadophile for a
partner...

~~~
stefco_
Sure, but it's always much more frustrating and disappointing when those
tasked with protecting the innocent end up ruining innocent lives. In
particular, it's frustrating that better auditing procedures and transparency
would prevent things like this from happening.

It's also scary how, due to the persistence of (mis)information on the
internet, it is possible to end up with (either undeserved or at least
excessive) notoriety that follows you across the world with little chance of
escape. Who the hell is going to hire someone when a google search of their
name mentions that they were arrested on pedophilia charges? Never mind
whether they were innocent.

[edit: as another poster pointed out, it seems his partner was not the
pedophile, but rather that their shared IP address, which was registered to
her, was the incorrectly entered value]

~~~
noja
> better auditing procedures and transparency

Or using "Copy and Paste" rather than manually typing something.

