Carly Fiorina, former HP CEO and newly minted Republican presidential candidate, understands technology. This is apparent both from her professional background and her decision to schedule a Periscope chat (sorry, Meerkat) for just a few hours from now. Carly Fiorina gets it, or at the very least would like you to think she does. Which is what makes it all the more surprising that her campaign staff somehow didn't lock up carlyfiorina.org.

You know who did? About 30,000 frowny face emoticons.

When you visit carlyfiorina.org, you're met not with a grinning image of the eponymous candidate and an invitation to donate. That's strictly carlyforpresident.com fluff, and also where carlyfiorina.com redirects to. Instead, the .org equivalent displays plain white text against a navy-ish background that reads:

Carly Fiorina failed to register this domain. So I'm using it to tell you how many people she laid off at Hewlett-Packard. It was this many:

Followed by a cascade of unhappy emoticons. After an impressive amount of scrolling, you're told the final tally, and met with a quote from Fiorina that says that if she could have changed anything about the layoffs, she wishes she "could have done them all faster."

That quote—and those figures—are a bit of calculated misdirection; it comes from a 2005 Fortune magazine profile of Fiorina, in which she's very clearly referring to a handful of top-level executives who left the company through "firings, resignations, and retirements," not the wholesale slaughter that's implied.

As for the 30,000 jobs, that's certainly true, but as Politifact pointed out in 2010, it's a bit more complicated than the raw number. Fiorina oversaw a merger with then-tech-giant Compaq during her HP tenure, and many of the eliminated jobs came from the redundancies that occur when you mush two companies together. Which is not to excuse the merger in the first place; it was and remains widely regarded as a significant blunder, and ultimately contributed to the HP board of directors forcing her to resign in 2005.

The site also contains a couple of easter eggs; hidden in the source code is a "demon sheep" image, a reference to Fiorina's bizarre 2010 attack ad against then-primary-opponent Ted Campbell that featured, well, a demonic sheep falling from a pedestal. That same joke plays out at [Fact-checking quibbles and obscure hidden references aside, though, what's most striking about carlyfiorina.org is that it exists at all, or rather that it exists outside of Fiorina's own stables. Fiorina has been politically active for years, including that 2010 California senate run. Domain look-up service Whois.net shows that carlyfiorina.org wasn't created in December of 2014, by an anonymous owner with a bone to pick (we've reached out for comment). Surely at some point in those four years, someone in her camp would have thought to log into GoDaddy.

The misstep is all the more absurd for not being the first of its kind. Visitors to tedcruz.com, for instance are still met not with the Texan Senator's visage but with a plea to "SUPPORT PRESIDENT OBAMA. IMMIGRATION REFORM NOW!". Similarly, tedcruz2016.com and tedcruz2016.org were both owned by a third party who had used those domains to display a series of scenic pictures, until the campaign asked nicely for him to redirect to tedcruz.org.

In the moment it's a funny gaffe, a chance to throw pebbles at giant campaign bears. But it also speaks to a larger lack of preparedness, an inability to anticipate the obvious consequences of an even more obvious oversight. There's only so much you can do if someone parked on your campaign domain before you ever thought to have one. But carlyfiorina.org isn't even politically specific. It's simply who she is. Or was, until 30,000 : ( took her place.](http://carlyfiorina.org/bonus-page.html)