Whoops! My Bad! Real Bad!

Well, there still should have been a checkpoint down the line to avoid that happening.

 

Don't fret.

Rochester, NY, paper does a monthly special section between 12 and 20 pages each month highlighting the daily routine of one of the local 'burbs -- it's an excuse to sell ads surrounded by 15 bylined stories and some photos.

A couple years ago, the project editor picked up the pages from the previous month's section and shipped them to the print plant. They ran 140K copies before one of the guys on the pressroom floor said, "Sheeeeeet, Elmer, this section looks awwwwwfully familiar."

 

Yeah, looking back on Sunday, I realize part of it was the fact I was still hung over from my bachelor party and part of it was because I am getting married Saturday, am still booking honeymoon crap, etc. I'll be the first to admit my mind has been elsewhere for about nine days now.

But again, there's no excuse for not double (triple) checking the pages — or grabbing the right one in the first place! I'm just saying.

 

If I were your boss, I'd never, ever, let you work desk again. How does that sound?

 

In the interviewing styles of some on here ...

SosueMe, Talk about your experiences of layout and making such a horrible blunder and what it means to your career

 

My biggest fuck-up happened a month ago. My damn brain fried, and I referred to a track coach by a completley wrong name.

Completely idiotic. I called Person A for some back ground info, which he didn't have, then used Person A's name on the track coach's quotes. Throughout the whole damn story.

That, as they say, was not scoreboard.

 

Don't feel bad fella. I knew a sports editor who did a piece once on a coach and his career at a school glamorizing him for becoming the all-time winningest football coach after a particular victory. It wa huge, full-page spread with massive headline and slobber all over it. I thought it was a bit over done at the time but then came the real horror.

Come to find out over the weekend they realized the coach hadn't broken the record and, in fact, was several wins from breaking it. Needless to say, the story was retracted and an apology/correction run acknowledging the mistake.

He was badly embarrassed. Now he's an agate clerk. True story.

 

I have one similar to (although not as bad as) that. I was at a new job, one of the first stories on the local hockey team, the biggest draw in town. It's a feature on who might be captain this upcoming season. I wrote during training camp. Anyway, one of the guys I focussed on had the same last name as a former college hoops teammate of mine. The b-ball player was Mike and the hockey player was Matt. So my mom comes to visit and sees this HUGE photo of the guy and feature story, complete with pull quote by the guy, on the sports front the day she arrives and IMMEDIATELY says, "Oh, wow, they have a Mike Bumblefrick on the hockey team? Didn't you play with a Mike Bumblefrick in college?"

 

Shit happens. Shake it off. The best thing about this business is you get another opportunity to fuck it up again. Don't fuck it up.

 

Funny you should say that MileHigh. I worked with a copy editor who botched a headline and got new asshole torn.

So he goes home and calculates how many headlines he wrote in the past year leading up to that one mistake. Then, he calculates how many LETTERS/CHARACTERS he's typed. Then he calculated his success rate in terms of a percentage, like a batting average. Next day he marches into the ME's office the next day with all the numbers.

It was classic.

 

If you had fucked up your honeymoon plans instead of the paper, that would have been worse. There's another paper tomorrow. Hopefully, only one wedding.