Modern day applications of an old story

Every scribe is familiar with, and sometimes over-fond of telling the following story from the Talmud Bavli, Sotah 20a (my translation):

Rabbi Yehuda related the following in the name of Shmuel about Rabbi Meir (more on him next week). Once I was mixing ink and Rabbi Akiva asked me my trade. I replied that I am a scribe to which Rabbi Akiva responded "My son, be very careful for your work is Divine and you may come to leave out a letter or add an extra one and destroy the entire world.

Sofrim, in particular authors of books on safrus, like this story because it illustrates the responsibility of the position. The sofer, especially in our story before the advent of printing, was responsible for faithfully transmitting scripture (and tradition as well) to the next generation with absolute fidelity. Today, of course, most of our books are printed and the sofer's work is almost entirely for ritual use but textual accuracy is still paramount. A couple days ago I was, as halacha requires, copying letter-for-letter out of a Tikkun Sofrim or official copyist's guide.

Here is the text of Eicha 3:33:

כי לא ענה מלבו, ויגה בני-איש.

Here is a picture of my copyist's guide:

Note the missing vav

 Trusting the sofer who made this copy, I copied letter for letter without checking and did not even suspect a mistake until I showed it to someone much more familiar with the text who picked up on it right away. This is the kind of error that can go undetected for years and even -- as I found out the hard way -- make its way into "official" texts. Fortunately there was no harm done as I was able to add the missing vav without much trouble but I learned a lesson about picking up just any old Tikkun and got a good scare about the responsibility to triple check everything. Somebody might copy from it one day.