A couple of months ago, I walked into a local chocolate shop downtown. After listening to the owner’s spiel and perusing the shelves, I found a little stack of flyers by their cash register. Find me some words and I will read them.
About three seconds after picking up this flyer, I spotted a typo about two-thirds of the way down the page. Putting aside the small chance that they were actually using something called “electicity,” I pointed the error out to the cashier. She picked up a copy to see for herself and called it out to her boss in amazement.
“No one has spotted that in the three years we’ve been here,” he said.
Now, I’d be willing to bet that someone else over the last three years had noticed the typo, but maybe they’d already left the shop, or maybe they just have more tact than I do.
“I’m an editor,” I said, by way of apology.
He jokingly offered me a job, handed me my hot chocolate, and we parted ways on perfectly amicable terms.
And you know what? I still have no idea what the flyer actually said. The only thing I can tell you for sure is that, somewhere in that company, they use electricity.
As my old friend Adrian Monk would say, “It’s a gift and a curse.”
