by Jeff Deck
The next day, my good fortune continued as our Atlanta hosts, Abby and Eli, brought me to the Emory University Hospital ER (the one option for medical care on a Sunday) to get my ailing eye treated. Then, while Benjamin headed off for a necessary haircut, I strolled down to another drugstore for a transparent makeup bag that would serve as a container for my ever-burgeoning collection of typo-correcting tools. My Typo Correction Kit was finally an actual kit.
Still, one thing nagged at me that morning as Abby loaded us up with her savory, buttery scones. The whole purpose of this quest, to rid the world of the scourge of typos, could be viewed in a different way: I was attending to public communication in its written form, attempting to enhance the clarity of the message. If typos were a communication issue, I wondered what other barriers existed among my countrymen that frustrated attempts at open and honest interchange.
Maybe my mission itself should be broadened to include all forms of communication troubles. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to do that. I wasn’t even sure what I meant. For the time being, I decided to make a mental note of how broader communication issues surfaced during our labors. Benjamin and I said our farewells to our exceedingly gracious hosts and climbed into Callie to continue on our way westward, unaware that the Underground Atlanta episode was only the first that would complicate our seemingly straightforward quest. Like physics in the late twentieth century, my mission had begun to gain extra dimensions.
TYPO TRIP TALLY
Total found: 38
Total corrected: 21
7 | Fear and Retail
March 17–18, 2008 (Mobile, AL, to New Orleans, LA)
Chronicling a tale of two cities’ reactions toward our heroes’ fateful Endeavors: It was the best of typos. It was the worst of typos. From Mobile to New Orleans, the battle betwixt Automatons and Autonomy blazes.
I awoke to a joyous morning in an Alabama hotel room, finding that my battered eye had convalesced enough to actually permit vision. Markers and pens and elixir of correction are important, but oh how vital to have the most basic of typo-hunting tools, the ones physically yoked to your head, in good working order. Now I could tend to my most faithful companion, Callie, who had expressed greater distress with each turn of her engine. Before leaving Montgomery, we took her in for a new battery, and for part of the wait, Benjamin and I explored the dark caverns of a nearby mall. A deserted mall, it turned out, with more space open for rent than for business; they’d decided to save money by leaving most of the lights off. Surely this was not what Victor Gruen, architect of the fully enclosed shopping complex, had envisioned. Our footsteps echoed with eerie clacks.
From my first blunderings around in Boston to more recent stumbles in Montgomery, I’d discovered that to find more typos, I needed to find more text. A grocery store in Philadelphia proved as fertile a breeding ground for typos as is a stagnant pond for mosquitoes. Other venues had offered mixed results: restaurants in Maryland and Virginia, museums in North Carolina, tourist traps and upscale promenades in South Carolina, and of course Underground Atlanta. That’s when it occurred to me that the League had failed to scrutinize American capitalism’s most sacred territory. Montgomery’s ghost mall wasn’t the proper place to begin, but I had yet to call any mall to account.
I had great hopes of seeing more significantly historical—and fun—things when we got to Mobile on that St. Paddy’s afternoon. My guidebook mentioned the World War II battleship USS Alabama and submarine USS Drum, as well as other tourism focused around instruments of war. Yet the need to visit a mall lay heavy upon me. Immediately after checking in at our latest Econo Lodge, we struck out for the nearest shopping behemoth. There we viewed a familiar roster, the exact same stores we could find in our own home cities—and anywhere else one happened to roam.
“I hope they have Dippin’ Dots,” Benjamin said as we entered through Dillards. “I have a hankerin’.”
We hadn’t trodden far into the mall when we came upon an autonomous unit for mid-mall snacking,* and though this concession stand held no dots for dippin’, we stopped to look over the assorted snacks. There, on a candy cooker, I found a sign that stirred only my hunger for grammatical clarity: CAUTION: DO NOT TOUCH VERY HOT!
What’s the sound you make that indicates a period? Or a semicolon? Whereas the rest of written language is supposed to correspond to the oral form directly;* punctuation doesn’t seem to fill in for any sound at all. No, it indicates the spaces in between, and that’s a relatively new invention, but one that we’ve stuck with since the mass production of books became possible. Printer Aldus Manutius is credited with creating our modern system of punctuation, though his marks have migrated downward on the line and gotten smaller and subtler (the way the indicator of a pause should be). He created them for the very reason you originally learned to use the comma wherever you’d pause: to give writing speech effects. A period’s utility is immediately obvious it marks the completion of each thought think how difficult it would be if we didn’t have those to tell us where one ended and the next began that would make reading a much more stressful task. The comma’s helpfulness is more understated, but it has the same effect of aiding the reader in breaking a full thought up into pieces, offering us pause-points between each segment.
In this case (CAUTION: DO NOT TOUCH VERY HOT!), any one of several different marks after TOUCH would fill the bill. Traditional grammar might favor a colon: the directive DO NOT TOUCH is followed by a clarification of why touching is not desirable, much as this very clause clarifies why a colon would work in the sign. Given that there’s already a colon after CAUTION, though, a dash might be better—to emphasize the very hotness! A period or exclamation point would break the two parts into separate sentences, though VERY HOT doesn’t make for much of a sentence, lacking both a subject and verb. Personally, I could find room in my heart for a semicolon, that old benchwarmer of the punctuative ball club, or even a comma. Just to have something there, to plug the yawning absence that currently confused the warning. The girl behind the counter—or rather, enclosed within it—had been cavorting with a young suitor and only took notice of us when we’d remained stationary for a long moment.
“Oh, don’t mind us,” Benjamin said. “We’re crossing the country correcting typos.”
She laughed. “All right.”
“See, it says ‘DO NOT TOUCH VERY HOT!’” I said. “But without a dash or colon or anything, the meaning is confused.”
“Like, they don’t know what not to touch,” said Benjamin.
“They’re looking for the Very Hot. And they can’t find it.”
“They say, ‘Yeah, I can’t touch the Very Hot, but I can touch everything else.’”
“It’s like a ‘Don’t tease the snake’ pet-store sign.”
“Right, yeah,” said the girl, still laughing, “I see what you’re saying.”
“So we’ll just fix this, then,” I said. “We’ll draw in the comma. I have a black marker.”
Immediately our standing in her view changed from that of jocular pals to troublesome customers. The candy seller’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “Ha, ha, no, that’s okay.”
“Seriously, we can just fix it for you,” said Benjamin.
“No …,” the girl said. “I’d get in trouble with my boss.”
I couldn’t help but glance at her suitor as she said this. What would she get in trouble for, exactly? “Aww, you can look the other way, right?” I said. Benjamin cracked up at that, having heard the same phrase innumerable times at the bookstore, though in more earnest tones, as someone attempted coupon abuse or truffle-pocketing at the register. I was no natural wheedler, but I pressed on anyway. “We’ll make it quick.”
She pointed at the ceiling. “The cameras are always watching.”
Now nobody was laughing anymore. I gestured at the sign, the barest hint of frustration creeping into my voice. “So you’re saying that if we put one little comma in here, to correct this, we will get you in trouble. T
hat is really what you’re saying.”
That was really what she was saying. Sensing that we could reason no further with her, Benjamin and I left the candy stand to resume our course through the mall. I wondered if the hidden supervisor had been watching us through his ceiling-mounted camera, cackling softly in some darkened control room. “You can talk with your little boyfriend all you like,” I could hear him wheezing at his charge, “but even he can’t save you if you let them touch my caution sign!”
Though the concession confrontation had disheartened us, our next encounter ripped the cardiac muscle from our chests with even greater force. We strolled into a Hallmark store, and Benjamin blinked, then darted for a sign on the wall. I confess that I’d passed it without noticing anything amiss, but Benjamin has a special mental tuner for errors that slip the bonds of logic and travel into a madder space. NO REFUND OR NO EXCHANGE ON ANY SEASONAL OR SALE ITEM.
As ever, our examination of a sign did not go without someone examining us, in this case a young guy at the store’s register. He leaned over the counter. “Can I help you, sir?”
“Hello, yes,” I said. “I had a question about your store policy on seasonal or sale items. Do you offer no refunds, or no exchanges?”
“Yes, that’s correct,” he said. “No refunds and no exchanges.”
“Right, but the sign says no refund or no exchange,” Benjamin pointed out.
“Yes, that’s what I said,” the young man replied.
“No, there’s a difference,” said Benjamin. “See, your sign says no refunds, or no exchanges, implying that only one of the two can be true at any given time. If we make a simple change, making the ‘or’ an ‘and,’ the sign will forbid both refunds and exchanges on seasonal and sale items.”
“I have some Wite-Out and a pen, right here,” I said. Before I could suggest, alternatively, eliminating the second “no,” I noted another sales clerk moving over from an endcap display she’d been working on. She stepped forward like an actor with no speaking lines who’s been told to act intimidating. The universal “you wanna go?” gesture, implying a willing readiness for violence as a gambit to prevent it. Benjamin had made the same aggressive forward-step once at work, after a crazy homeless guy had thrown a bag of food past one of his café employees. In character, the woman said nothing. After a moment of cold silence, the young man behind the counter said, “Okay, we will make the change later. Thank you.”
“We could do it right—”
“No. Thank you. We will make the change later.”
“Now they are lying,” Benjamin said as soon as we’d reentered the tiled floor of the mall proper. “If they didn’t understand the problem, there’s no way they would be able to fix it, and they definitely didn’t understand what we were saying.”
“They didn’t want to listen,” I replied, wondering about that immediate resistance. Once I turned from the return policy to the subject of the sign itself, a wall had gone up, hindering them from processing anything I said. That clerk’s eyes had remained so blank.
Benjamin muttered, “Future Shock.” I could see him jerk perfectly upright, as if inspiration had tugged on his marionette strings. “This is what Alvin Toffler pointed out almost forty years ago.” He tried to articulate how we’d witnessed the consequence and conundrum of the Industrial Revolution and the throwaway society. We’ve got Model-T employees in Eli Whitney’s cotton-gin workplace, he explained—interchangeable workers, did I dig?
I dug. The Hallmark clerk had not required an apprenticeship to learn his job; it was largely mechanical. Even an employee who excelled could only do so much good here. Both the employer and the employee saw the relationship as temporary. The employer saw no benefit in the relationship’s being permanent, and the employee recognized that and acted accordingly. Employees in a retail setting lacked any vested interest in the company’s success or failure; they got paid the same whether the store reached its sales goals or not. Making a decision could only offer repercussions for the wrong choice, and no reward for the right one.
Switching gears before his comments had caught up to each other, Benjamin almost offhandedly added, “I’d never thought about it before, but a typo that everyone walks past and no one ever corrects signifies a much deeper communication breakdown.” He started singing Zeppelin to work off his frustrations. I wondered if Benjamin meant that a typo no one noticed signified a breakdown in grammatical awareness or if he’d meant that a typo people did notice and didn’t comment on suggested that the employees weren’t talking to one another. When he attempted a screechy high note, I interrupted. He clarified that he’d meant the latter. “No one cares about their work environment enough to deal with the drudgery of actually talking to each other. What a drag that can be.”
I nodded, then backed up to what had bothered me most about that hallmark of grammatical obstruction. “So I get that retail sales positions are as replaceable—and disposable?—as the clothing we buy rather than mend, but I’m a customer making a request. Aren’t they supposed to listen to my feedback?”
“From my own experience, no.” He then launched into a jeremiad about handling customer complaints. He would go out of his way to fix the problems most relevant to service. Someone’s order hadn’t arrived? He’d track it down. Someone ripped the soap dispenser off the wall in the men’s restroom … again? Okay, he’d arrange to get a bottle of soap in there and then survey the damage. But when someone wanted to complain about something that came down from the corporate office, well, Benjamin would have no control over the policy-making of higher-ups. When people brought up noncontrollables such as this, he couldn’t do much about them, so he’d work to end the conversation quickly rather than attempt to resolve the issue—because he couldn’t. And an author coming in with her self-published opus and wanting to do a book signing, or someone wanting to put up flyers for their half-marathon downtown, would fall into an even more unfortunate category: stuff Benjamin doesn’t care about that is interfering with his focus on actual customer service. It wasn’t his job to help a writer who’d photocopied her self-help ramblings and expected people to pay for them. Nor was it his job to run a community bulletin board, as much as he likes those. His sole purpose at that store boiled down to helping customers obtain their next awesome read, and to make that process as smooth as possible. Anyone coming to him about anything else was in his way.
He stopped to reflect. “The typo hunting is an interesting case, because I would group this in the same category as the bathroom thing. It’s a controllable thing that reflects on the store, so while I might not want to hear it, I’d still want to act on it. Also, the Hallmark store had no customers. The other lady was using the time to do a merch display, but we didn’t interrupt her. We went for the bored clerk.”
Benjamin’s observations sang true to my open ears, but I sensed that the melody of the modern retail worker contained still richer timbres. He had described the perspective of an employee making thoughtful decisions that ultimately served the greater welfare of the store, but the Hallmark guy had been acting via instinct, not his gray matter. Why did he respond differently than Benjamin would have?
The journalist Art Kleiner offers one rather dismal answer in his book Who Really Matters? The Hallmark clerk struck a deal with his supervisors that effectively sells off his brain for each eight-hour shift behind the register. We tend to automatically bestow the mantle of legitimacy upon the shoulders of our bosses; we do what they want us to do. Eventually, says Kleiner, this transforms into us doing what we think they’d want us to do. We create a miniature, mental version of our supervisors, and then consult this imaginary stand-in whenever an issue arises. Frank the real-life boss might have once said in passing, “Could you order me some more blue pens?;” henceforth, the mental Frank will decree, “At this company we use blue pens, so don’t you dare use a black one on any official forms!” Thus our decisions are easier, faster. Now you’re using blue ink on all your paperwork, even if it doesn’
t show up very well on corporate’s new green forms. Our gift to those above us in the company hierarchy is legitimacy, and their dubious gift to us is simplified cognition. Such a trade-off perfectly explains not only the dead-eyed Hallmark guy, but also the girl at the candy counter, who imagined her boss as literally peering down at her from the ceiling, like some adjudicating god.
In an infamous experiment on obedience, the psychologist Stanley Milgram led test subjects to believe they were administering electrical shocks to individuals in another room. The troubling results showed that as long as an official-looking representative stood nearby and nodded for them to continue, a majority of people would administer continually greater shocks, some going all the way to the highest voltage even when the supposed victim had become nonresponsive. Having an authority figure to look toward releases us from feeling personally responsible for our decisions and actions. Not my problem; I just work here. Milgram also carried out many variations on this experiment. In one, he played with the physical presence of the authority figure, removing him from the room and having him give the subject instructions over the phone. Subjects complied far less readily without the authority figure looming over them in person.
The disquieting implication of Kleiner’s argument is that the work environment is short-circuiting this last effect, bending the employee’s will permanently toward following the instructions of a boss-avatar perched on her shoulder.
Rather than pursue these dour reflections further, I suggested we shelve the typo hunting for now and head for RadioShack. We hoped to find a new battery for the video camera my cousin had mailed us in South Carolina, but they’d apparently stopped manufacturing batteries for this model right around the time that Murphy Brown went off the air. I passed by a whiteboard on our way out, then spun around and headed back inside. A different clerk greeted us, and I said, “Sorry. I noticed something on the whiteboard out there that I don’t think is quite right. Isn’t there a double s in ‘Sony Ericsson’?”