Whoops! My Bad! Real Bad!

All this talk of corrections begs the question -- when you screw up, would you rather no one at the paper say anything about it or get taken to the woodshed for it? I always thought I preferred nothing being said, but I've changed my mind. When people get upset, it shows they care. Thoughts?

 

When I screw up, I deserve to be told about it. At the same time, I'm harder on myself than anybody else would be.

 

dogma from the church of absolutism.

plagiarism is a gray area. borges didn't know what he took from the pooled notebook had appeared elsewhere. it was generic information that could have come out of a press guide. nobody owns generic information.

pure self-righteous dogma.

 

If you know you screwed up, admit it. It's always best to fall on your own sword rather than play the blame game. Your superiors usually know who is to blame and they'll respect you if you shoulder the blame rather than try to deflect it.

 

Worst mistake I made was juxtaposing the numbers in the score on a gamer, so instead of it being 54-37, it was 57-34.

Didn't realize it until I read the paper the next morning and wondered why the score was wrong in the headline. Oops.

 

When I was new at this I misspelled the president's name in 48-point type (Reagan, and I still have to look it up). It was on an outdoors column and apparently no one noticed, or thought some local guy named Reagen must have caught a fish or shot a critter and didn't read the column, because not a word was said. After about a week, I was wondering who was a bigger idiot, me or the folks in the glass offices who apparently didn't read their own paper.

Mistakes happen. My experience is that people who never seem to make a mistake never seem to do much work. Years ago I worked with a guy who was going through a bad time and his answer to avoiding mistakes was to do absolutely nothing with the body type, just wave it through. I suppose he thought an error of omission would be less on him than an error of commission. He was fucking useless, and it was really unnecessary.

I was still pretty new at running desks and the department head used to advise me to "judge people by the mile instead of by the yard" -- sound advice that took me a while to learn to adopt. When someone screws up, you have to weigh all they contribute against that.

 

SSM, I don't think you're quite getting that part of it. Doesn't matter if it was your bachelor party, or your final night of drinking before a lifetime of teetotaling. If your being hung over in any way led to something getting fucked up in the paper, you lost a lot of your error margin.

As far as counting up one's errors as a percentage of total workload, yeah, it's a good point. And every one of us, were we to add it up, would have a pretty good batting average. But one thing my boss never lets me forget is that I can wipe out months of perfect production with one really bad error. It may not be fair, but it is the nature of the job.

 

It is the nature of the job. But I have more respect for bosses who understand that we'll never attain perfection. The job before this one, some douche decided to make the news-side copy editors (we didn't have to in sports) fill out a form every time they made a mistake, explaining why they screwed up and what steps they'll take to avoid a similar mistake. To me it seemed more punitive than corrective and I really have no patience for that. You know, if you have some revolutionary idea for how to eliminate human error, I'm certainly listening, but if you want to rub people's noses in shit and you've never spent a day on the desk (or covered a game on deadline) and have zero understanding of how extremely difficult and stressful the job is, well, my response is generally a silent fuck you.

A terrific slot on the best desk I ever worked on was training me to slot copy their way, and she said that her goal is a perfect section and she's never had one yet. And it's true -- if your standards are high, you will always find something screwed up later, which is why years ago I stopped bringing home the first edition and reading it before going to bed. Always gonna be something.

 

Quite true.

 

We have a similar system in place where I'm at now. Any corrections that need to be run need something filled out by supervisors within the system and usually what's put on there for what caused the problem is "carelessness" or "poor editing." Of course, whoever made the mistake nine times out of 10 never is asked what happened, it's just an assumption of what happened by the higher-up working day-side and it's just passed on. Yeah, we have communication issues here.

 

Jeez...let it go. Some agree with you. Some don't. Some thing it is idiotic to claim that there is only one right way to do things in this business. If you have to keep harping on this stuff, at least leave it on the other thread.

And SoSueMe, sounds like you have the right attitude. Own up to it, but don't freak out and move on.

I had a run of a couple weeks in a row that I initially sent in high school football gamers with the wrong final score (I'm not even going to mention how it happened. Sounds too much like making excuses to my ears). Neither got in the paper. I caught one a couple of minutes after I sent it. The other I caught about 15 minutes later, but a desk guy saw it first.

My SE, who I had known for years, didn't flip out. He very calmly told me that if I did it again, I shouldn't bother coming back to the office. No idea how serious he was, but I made sure I never found out.

Could be worse. I know a guy who attributed quotes in one of his stories to a person who was dead.