Basic Trope: An printing error on a T-shirt, bumper sticker, poster, sign, etc. that leads to large embarrassment for the customer.
- Straight: Alice's posters for her presidential campaign say "A lice? Who could be a better president?"
- Exaggerated: The posters say "Yg go vjnchjghjvg aSvhj" and the printer made no effort even to try to display what the client requested.
- Downplayed: Alice's posters read "Alice? Who could be a better resident?" It has Fridge Brilliance if you think about it for long enough because, ideally, a country’s president should be the best person who lives there, but it isn't the word she wanted to use.
- Justified: People make mistakes. This just happened to be one of them.
- Inverted: Alice’s campaign submitted a design rife with misspelling and the printer fixed it for them.
- Subverted: It turns out, Alice isn’t running for president. A louse is.
- Double Subverted: But that louse used the plural form, so there is still an error.
- Parodied:
- The posters say “Alice sucks! Throw your tomatoes at her!”
- Unfortunately for Alice, the posters were so successful that the louse won as a write-in vote.
- Zig-Zagged:
- There seems to be an error, but a louse is running for president. But, the louse used the plural form, and is still incorrect. At least, until the louse reveals that several lice are running for the spot as a group. But the error is still there because "A lice" is incorrect.
- Every other poster promotes the candidacy of "Alice" versus "A lice."
- Averted:
- The posters say "Alice? Who could be a better president?"
- Alice doesn’t have any posters.
- Enforced: Rule of Funny
- Lampshaded: "Okay, who made these posters?"
- Invoked: One of Alice’s workers prints an incorrect poster to help her rival, Bob.
- Exploited: Bob, the other nominee in the election, says that this shows Alice's lack of spelling and grammar skills.
- Defied:
- Alice sees the flawed posters, removes them, and recreates them. Correctly.
- Before Alice puts the posters up, she manually checks to see if they have any errors.
- Discussed: "It's a good thing they didn't make any silly mistakes on these posters. That'd be embarrassing."
- Conversed: "If that happened to me, I'd go to the print shop and demand my money back."
- Deconstructed:
- No one votes for Alice because the print error causes people to think "If Alice can't even make her own posters correctly, how will she be able to run the country?"
- The print shop goes out of business because they botched such an important job and now no one trusts them to do anything correctly.
- Reconstructed: People still vote for Alice after she makes it clear that it was the print shop's fault.
- Implied: Alice is on the phone with the print shop. It's not clear what she's saying but the poster she is holding suggests that the call is related to the print error.
- Played for Laughs: Alice now has to cater her presidency campaign towards living lice.
- Played for Drama: This causes Alice’s popularity to plummet. If Bob defeats her, he will singlehandedly turn the country into a chaotic anarchy.
Buck ta Acquired Error at the Printer.
