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At times, good news goes bad

Seems just now and in recent years, colleges have been mistakenly sending out acceptance notices to students.

The latest incident involved the State University of New York at Buffalo, which sent out 5,109 erroneous acceptance letters to student hopefuls.

The mistake was made when an incorrect email list was generated from a database of applicants, according to the statement from John DellaContrada, the university's associate vice president for media relations and stakeholder communications, according to a CNN story last week. Within several hours, applicants were emailed an explanation of the error, along with apologies. At the time of the story, applications were still under review, and the expectation was that some of those who were accepted by mistake will receive genuine invitations to "Shuffle Off to Buffalo."

That's got to be a blow. Not sure where it would stand in comparison to Steve Harvey's accidental naming of the wrong Miss Universe but, as the story author points out, waiting to be accepted at one's desired college is a stressful thing for many a high school senior. The story went on to mention other inadvertent college acceptances that went out, including Carnegie Mellon University's 2015 acceptance emails to 800 applicants who had actually been rejected for its master's program in computer science (ouch) and Johns Hopkins University's 2014 accidental come-hithers to early-admissions applicants. In 2012, 894 students were led to believe they'd been accepted to the University of California at Los Angeles.

As the saying goes, "to err is human; to forgive divine." (And Harvey has recovered quite well from his fumble ... even making a joking Super Bowl commercial about it.)

But we'd all hate to be on the receiving end of an erroneous notification that a major desire of ours was going to be fulfilled. Just a few notifications that some of us would be disappointed to find out were false:

• That we won the Powerball lottery, the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes, or the HGTV Dream Home.

• That those same feds who authorized low-flow toilets decided to go back and rule that they must all be made taller.

• That all Real Housewives shows had been canceled, never to return to TV, even in syndication.

• That the IRS goofed and we're due a tax refund after all (or extra money, if we've already gotten original refunds and blown them on whatever relentless "spend your tax refund with us" TV commercial made us an offer we couldn't refuse).

• That Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un had decided to just embrace baldness.

• That those social media promises of getting a new electronic device if we just click on or share whatever are really, really true!

• That the "Twinkie diet" that worked for that nutrition professor dude in 2010 is the perfect diet for all of us. Even those of us who are over 40 and/or who gain 10 pounds just looking at a carbohydrate.

• That "random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty" were occurring in mass numbers, even on the Internet.

• That we'd been rejected for admission to, or been expelled from, the School of Hard Knocks.

• That any geographical area suffering a natural disaster would get to enjoy a 10-year reprieve before suffering the same disaster again.

• That non-Obamacare insurance rates will be going down.

• That Saturday afternoon wait times at all beauty salons, spas, auto repair places, and big-box retail store checkout lanes had been eliminated.

• That wait times in general at all doctors' offices had been eliminated.

• That that whole Kardashian dynasty thing was all a convoluted dream.

• That it's actually Wednesday, Nov. 9.

• Or that it's early 2017 and whoever won the election did happen to abolish the IRS.

Say it is so ... email:

[email protected]

Style on 04/24/2016

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