Many times in my life, I have been guilty of not taking enough time to ensure I understand what someone is communicating and end up mis-understanding them. We could say this is life but in the commercial world, some mistakes are simply not worth making because they can involve time, money, reputation and legal issues.
One such email from someone at work asked what would happen if a certain program failed because of a permission problem. My assumption was that since this program wrote to disk, the man was talking about a file permission and I responded accordingly, pointing out a potential glaring omission in functionality. Fortunately, someone else who read the email was aware of a problem which actually related to a permission calling a service and which, when I looked into it, was much more mundane and didn't cause any problems other than the program crashing.
I guess "measure twice/cut once" should apply to software as much as the building trades!