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Archive

Murphy’s Law: A case study

April 16, 2006

Murphy’s Law (in Latvian, Merfija likums) states that if anything can go wrong, it will. A case in point is an April 13 news release from President Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga’s usually top-notch press office.

A new Finnish-language book about the president, Meripihkahelmi povella. Latvian presidentti Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga (With an Amber Pearl in the Bosom: Latvian President Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga) is scheduled to be presented April 24-26 while the president visits Finland.

But the news release about the book caused some embarassment for the press office and, unintentionally, the publisher.

The book, by Nadine Vitols Dixon, is published by the Pētergailis company of Rīga. On the front cover is a nice portrait of the president. On the back cover is a summary in Finnish and a map of Europe that helps the reader locate Latvia.

Tālivaldis Kronbergs, editor of the Latvian student portal StudentNet, noticed that in a picture of the book’s cover distributed with the press release, the map also showed a divided Germany, a unified Czechoslovakia and a still-whole Yugoslavia.

East and West Germany were reunified in 1990. Yugoslavia began to break apart in 1991, as Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina pulled out of the long-running all-Slavic union. Czechoslovakia’s “velvet divorce” in 1993 saw the country divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Kronbergs’ find kept Press Secretary Aiva Rozenberga busy over the Easter weekend. She issued a new press release and answered at least one reporter’s questions, explaining that the book indeed has an accurate map of Europe on its cover.

The inaccurate map was used by the publisher in a draft version of the cover, Rozenberga told Latvians Online. Pētergailis even pointed out that the map would be updated in the final version—and it was.

But when the press release was e-mailed to various Latvian media, the picture sent along was of the draft version, not the final version.

It’s a lesson, Rozenberga said, to always delete the various versions of rough drafts that are created in any project.

— Andris Straumanis