Look at the second zayin in the word mezuzos. First of all, it looks like a dalit, which means it is posel. I asked a tinok to be sure, and he confirmed my suspicion and read ‘dalit’. In fact, he read three of the for zyians in this mezuzah as ‘dalit’. In addition to this problem, there is another serious issue. If you look closely, you will see a bit of ink has been scrapped away from the top left side of the zyian. What happened, and what does it mean. I am guessing that this letter was very close to the vov and that the sofer who was checking it wanted to seperate it. The only problem is that if that is the case, it looked even more like a dalit before he scrapped it away, so even if we could say it is a zyain now (which I don’t think we can say), it certainly looked like a dalit before it was fixed. If you turn one letter into another letter with a knife, it is chok tochos, carving the ink away to make a letter, and that is forbidden. Also, it would be s’lo k’sidrin, writing out of order, which is not permitted in tefillin and mezuzoss.
When I explained this to the customer, she had an interesting reaction. She couldn’t understand how it could be written wrong if she bought it from a reliable person for a lot of money. I think the answer is pretty simple. Firstly, he wasn’t so reliable. In fact, he failed. when it comes to the way that this mezuzah was checked, he gets an ‘f’. Secondly, she didn’t buy it for a lot of money. She did by some of her mezuzos for a lot of money, as she has some very nice mezuzos, but not this one. Probably this was purchased from a Judaica store, and likely was not checked by someone with smicha and knows what they are doing. Many times I check mezuzos for people and they tell me things that they really think are true, like where, when, and how much they spent, but I can tell that they forgot what actually happened. Sometimes they think they bought all their mezuzos from one person at one time, and I can see from the different styles of writing that this is probably not true.
I don’t want to bunch all mistakes that soferim make into the same thing. I also don’t want to claim that I never make mistakes, but there are legitimate mistakes, and there is negligence. This is negligence.