The longlasting typo on Nova Scotia's Iiquor I.D. cards
Province wrongly identified on cards as Nova 'Soctia' for much of the 1980s
The typo in Nova Scotia's name was noticed early on, but provincial liquor commission officials decided it wasn't worth spending the money to fix it — for six years.
As CBC reported in July of 1988, the province had been erroneously listed as Nova "Soctia" on identification cards for liquor purchases for years.
But why bother fixing what wasn't broken — or spelled correctly — even if that meant using the misspelled name of the province on the cards for much of the 1980s?
"We decided to carry on and use the cards that we had available until they're used up and save taxpayers money and so on," said Cal Craig of the Nova Scotia Liquor Commission, when explaining the rationale for still using the flawed cards six years after they were printed.
"So, that's what we've been doing."
'It's fake — but it's not'
And while the cards were generally accepted by bars in Nova Scotia, that wasn't the case elsewhere.
David Eisnor, a young man working at a radio station in Bridgewater, N.S., told CBC a story about his visit to a Boston bar that didn't know about the issue with the cards.
The bar wouldn't serve him, as its staff didn't believe his I.D. was real.
"It's a forgery, as far as they're concerned," said Eisnor, who had run into the problem in Boston because that is where he was going to school. "It's fake — but, it's not."
His story was amusing enough to catch the attention of the Lethbridge Herald newspaper, six provinces away in Alberta.
The paper's headline assigned a "failing grade" to the province for the misspelling that, according to the article, was present on thousands of cards still in stock.
