A lowbrow comedy of administrative errors performed at this desk last week put me painfully in mind of an old story, about Alden Wood, a grammar columnist who I used to “edit” when I was a professional lad.
That meant taking his typewritten column off the fax machine and typing it into your Mac as carefully as possible and praying that up, you did not fuck. Because if you did, there would be another fax, thanking you—as Alden once thanked one of my colleagues—for “your subfecal typesetting job.”
After one subfecal typesetting job in particular, Alden was forced to issue a correction. It was around Halloween, and he wrote a funny thing, as I remember, involving the Hound of the Baskervilles getting into the printing presses, or some such.
The hapless typesetter made a typo in the correction.
The fax machine almost exploded.
When the smoke had cleared, our aged publisher gently recommended to the editorial team that we not issue a second correction.
“These things tend to snowball,” he said, sadly.
Ah, Alden. I’ll never forget the time, typing up one of his columns or comments or something, I spelled the Massachusetts city of Worcester as though it were the Ohio town I was more familiar with (i.e., Wooster). There was trouble. It was a rite of passage at Ragan Report.