Typos

I have just wasted half a day, and I’m mad at myself. There I was this morning, sitting upstairs in the Heritage Collections reading room, and going through a box of papers labelled ‘Stock’. Not initially of huge interest – until I realised that I had been presented with a snapshot of a year from the stock manager’s viewpoint, enabling me to see which Thomas Nelson titles were out of stock or reprinting at various points in the year. All I had to do was work out the catalogue numbers for the titles I was interested in, and then see which ones came up in the lists, and how often. This was just a little bit more interesting!

I had almost worked through the entire box before lunch, and at that point, I was going to attend a seminar. Indeed, I did attend the seminar, and very good it was, too.

But in between the contentedly sifting through papers, and the contentedly attending an excellent seminar, I took it into my head to have one last search for a photo of the editor whose picture I have not yet traced. (It’s the kind of thing that enlivens a PowerPoint presentation.) Reader, I went to the Internet Archive, otherwise known as Archive.org. I’m not going to warn you off going to that website, because I fear that what happened next was all my own fault. I think I typed it in the plural, confusing it with the Archives Hub. Suddenly, I was asked to prove I wasn’t a robot. It did occur to me that they must have tightened up security, because I didn’t remember having to do that before. I obediently ticked the box.

When you get multicoloured text AND BLOCK CAPITALS warning you of a compromise, and mention of a software not used by your own institution, you stop right there.

I closed the screen, and notified the appropriate department. My computer was ‘isolated’, and the afternoon was spent getting back from Edinburgh to Glasgow to get the computer checked. Holding the potentially contaminated thing at arms length, I willingly handed it over. I type this on my own laptop at home – the other one is getting a deep scan! Maybe it was just a pop-up advert, but no chances are being taken.

As I said, I think it was my fault, if I mistyped the web address. But what I’m most annoyed about, is a perfectly promising afternoon being wasted by my typing an extra letter – if that’s what I did. I don’t think I’ll be mistyping that particular address ever again!