"The number you have texted..."

If you're making a permanent sign that will have thousands of copies, you want to proofread it before having it printed.  And then, have someone proofread it again, and then send it down to that guy who could find a mistaken grain of sand on the beach and have him look it over.

Because...

The city of Baltimore ordered hotels to print up thousands of signs for the best of intentions. The signs gave victims of human trafficking a phone number and text line where they could seek help to get out of the hell their lives have become.

The signs are required to be posted in every hotel room in the city, authority of the city council.

But they gave the hoteliers the wrong text number in the wording of the law.

Frank Boston III, a lawyer and lobbyist for the Maryland Hotel Lodging Association, said that the city's hotels have already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars complying with the requirement. He suggests that maybe the city could, instead of requiring all the signs to be redone with the correct information, obtain the incorrect number and make that the hotline.

“In good faith our members have cooperated with the legislation,” Boston said. “Unfortunately, signage information provided through the legislation was inaccurate.”

Boston said that hotel operators feel “it would be a tragedy for a cry for help [from a trafficking victim] to fall on deaf ears.”

And of course, hotels being where a lot of prostitution takes place, these unfortunate victims have a good chance of seeing the signs there.

“It was an honest mistake,” says City Councilman Kristerfer Burnett, co-chair of the Baltimore City Human Trafficking Collaborative, the sponsor of the bill. He's sorry about the mistake but he's working on getting it fixed.

The mistake (and there are mistakes, and there are MISTAKES) is that the bill orders hotels, adult entertainment joints, and food service facilities to post a sign with a national hotline number and the words "TEXT 'BEFREE' (233722).

Try it on your keypad, but BEFREE is 233733. But if you text to that wrong number, you hit an error message.

No one even noticed that snafu until legislation was being drafted to have the hotline posted in municipal buildings, and someone said, "Hey wait a minute...."

“It’s unfortunate that it took revisiting it to catch it, but at the same time we are very thankful that we caught it,” Burnett said.

The city is also thinking about stickers with the right number to place over the wrong one, but the hotel chains are not so fond of that idea.

The National Human Trafficking Hotline, says that Maryland, and Baltimore City in particular, records a very high rate of  “domestic human trafficking”  - one of the highest in the country, with more than 440 reports of child sex trafficking  across the state from 2014 to 2018, mostly in Baltimore.

Like someone much smarter than I once said, failing to plan is planning to fail. And every plan needs at least 37 proofreaders.