MOSCOW (AFP) – Russian media has been poking fun at US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton after she gave her Russian counterpart a "reset" button with an ironic misspelling.
Clinton's gift to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at their meeting in Geneva on Friday evening was meant to underscore the Obama administration's readiness to "to press the reset button" in ties with Moscow.
But instead of the Russian word for "reset" (perezagruzka) it featured a slightly different word meaning "overload" or "overcharged" (peregruzka).
Why am I not surprised? Russian's a difficult language indeed. However, this typo seems to be very emblematic. Our government tends to hire wrong people and keep them too long.
I remember back in Mainframe days, I used to hang out in our university's computer center. We had crappy Soviet clones of IBM/360 mainframes. The terminal had bulky CRT displays with a little red light on them, labeled with the same word as in Clinton's button ПЕРЕГРУЗКА(peregruzka). If the light came up, it meant that the mainframe was overloaded. You could lose all your work. So we had a habit of frequently saving our work.
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