Spell Check...For Icing?

Now this has more to do with the educational system but one of my co-workers was ordering a cake over the phone and they asked her how to spell "Congradulations." This was rather sad, since it is a fairly common word and I would make the assumption that a lot of their cakes get ordered for more than just Birthdays, so why was this one word so hard. I can only imagine the cake person getting that wrong and having to get someone else to correct it after the cake was finished. I have made a number of cakes in my time and making changes after other letters are already on there can be very difficult. But hearing that someone needed them to spell this very common word was new.

It is unfortunate to think we are getting to a point where machines and computers are making cakes and doing the icing so that spell check could be built into it, so that spelling errors would not occur. Is our educational system so bad that we have to verify everything, even the simple words? I hope not. I was kind of under the impression that we as a society were getting smarter and more advanced. I suppose that it is possible that like the income divide in this country that there is also a educational divide. I can only hope that as the reformation for education occurs that education for all gets better, since according to the world the US is dropping to an average of 18th in our overall ranking and subjects which is far from 1st place,where we used to be 20 years ago.