The Great Typo Hunt

by Jeff Deck

  “Hear me out. I know we’re a solid twenty-five corrections over fifty percent, but that”—and here he pointed to COMTEMPORARY, which he must have spotted second—“is just wrong.”

  “Then I hope this bookstore cares as much as we do about words.” I considered other bookstores we’d examined across the country, realizing how few of them had yielded typos. I’d made them a stop in nearly every major city. I could remember only Galveston’s bookstore typos now, and that place had been one of our best responses. I approached the counter, and the woman asked if I was ready to check out. I looked at Red Mars in my hand—I was, wasn’t I? After we did that, I asked about the signs.

  “Oh, we had a volunteer who made those signs.” Ahh, right. Volunteers are apparently held to a different standard. It was the Cartoon Art Museum all over again. If you’re getting paid, you ought to be professional, but what can they do to you when you’re a volunteer? If they’d written “maid by valunteeerz” on the signs, I could have saved myself the trouble of asking. I don’t know if the employee could read these thoughts from my face, but she must have read something (though clearly not the signs in her store). She added another reason not to bother: “They’ve been up for a long time and nobody seems to have noticed the mistake.”

  Seems, Madam! nay, it is; I know not “seems.”

  Okay, so now she’d passed the buck and projected her apathy onto everyone else, as if signs only became the store’s responsibility after multiple complaints had stacked up on her desk into a thickness sufficient to be bound and sold here: Please Fix Your Signs Already, by Your Customers (2008). I hoped it was merely the idea of having to do the work herself that had made her react so negatively, and so I offered to take care of the mistakes myself, presenting a phial of elixir to vouch for my sincerity.

  “No, we’ll take care of it,” she lied. Upon hearing how unconvincing she sounded, she switched lies. “The volunteer’s going to be making new versions of those signs anyway.”

  I’d heard all of these lines before, but never in such rapid succession, out of the same mouth. We’d gotten a bravura performance in the unlikeliest place; perhaps the bookstore clerk had missed her true calling on the stage. Benjamin laughed as soon as we hit the sidewalk. “Wow! You’d think she’d been following the blog to have come up with all those!”

  “What was the problem?” I nearly shouted. “I mean, why? I don’t understand why she wouldn’t at least let me white out that apostrophe?”

  “She could be an agent of FLAME,” Benjamin offered.

  The rain—or perhaps reign—of errant apostrophes continued to sluice onto our sunny day. We caught a whole row of plural apostrophes trapped in one sign behind glass. The juice bar hadn’t even opened for business yet, and already it drowned under the weight of excess punctuation. I wished it good luck and better proofreading as we continued on along the street.

  No quarrel with apostrophes would be complete, however, without at least one confusion of it’s and its. We stared at the dry-erase board, set on an easel outside the storefront of the Benton Shoe Company, which was NOW IN IT’S 16TH YEAR. Okay, this could be an easy fix. They’d let us wipe out that apostrophe, right? Before I even thought about it, my finger had stretched out toward the board, touching it, trying to wipe the little mark away. It failed to disappear. At that moment an employee popped through the front doorway, having noticed us staring at the sign. As much as I’d insisted on no stealth corrections, I’d been caught failing at one. “It’s the it’s,” I said lamely. “It should be its.”

  “Without an apostrophe,” Benjamin clarified.

  She must have been the person who’d written the sign—months ago, for the dry-erase marker had dried and become permanent. Her initial reply, without the defensive tone that the words implied, was, “I never promised that I was brilliant.” She said it with a casual shrug, but she didn’t slam the door in our faces. I wondered if we still had a chance at this one, as bad as we’d already made the situation, and as miserable and—dare I say—nightmarish as Elm Street had become. “An apostrophe,” I said, “that we can’t rub off—it won’t come out.”

  “Here,” she said, perhaps taking pity on us, “I know.” She reached for my Typo Correction Kit, and I offered her the closest color, which didn’t match the sign. She shrugged this detail off as well. “That’s all right.” Then, with my marker, she turned the apostrophe into a little star. Next she added another star to the board, and another, and another. She’d made a parallelogram constellation, or quadruple fireworks for the store’s obsidian anniversary. The apostrophe had been hidden amid the decorations. She handed back my dry-erase marker and with a quick, quirky smile, she zipped back into the store, humming a quiet tune to herself. No, she’d never promised to be brilliant—she’d just proven it.

  “Dude,” Benjamin said, “that was freaking amazing.”

  I wished, when I’d started the trip, that I’d had the foresight to create some kind of awards. “For Excellence & Creativity in Eradication, I award you this beribboned Typo Correction Kit.” Our fortunes had reversed course. As we moved farther down the street, I bounded nearly as high as Benjamin normally does.

  Another dry-erase board with a problem greeted us: STEAK CEASAR SALAD. The cashier initially told us not to worry because they’d be erasing it tomorrow, which seemed plausible as the salad was among the daily specials. When I told her of our quest and added that this stop represented the triumphal return to my roots, she bade us onward to correction with a heartfelt “Okay,” holding back the “whatever” that still spoke through the rustle of her shrug. Benjamin had caught a “ceasar” salad back in Hudson, and now I’d evened the score. My blue dry-erase marker didn’t quite match their light green, but it’d be gone tomorrow anyway. As I wiped it away, I turned to Benjamin and cried, “Me too, you brute! Then fall ‘ceasar’!”

  After noting that a like-minded individual had added some apostrophes to a sign desperately needing them—quickening the manufacture of good spirit in my heart’s grimy mills—I decided we’d successfully covered the main chunk of the street and should head back to the car. We agreed upon one last stop for drinks, mayhap smoothies, at the Bridge Café. Benjamin noted that the café had to be a cool place because it hosted poetry slams.

  Of all the typos I’d ever noticed, this would have to be one of the slightest infractions. Even apostrophes or lack thereof come down to a single mark, but this was in effect a sliver of a letter. Gorgonzola, up on the chalkboard, had been spelled “Gorganzola”. I smiled at how easy it’d be to have someone to reach up and, with the slightest finger-swipe, take the tail off that a to make it an o. I approached one of the two men behind the counter, and he accepted a TEAL card and heard us out, turning to see if he could spot the error. Before he had a chance to say anything, however, the other guy jumped in, practically shoving the first employee to the side. “So who says it’s wrong?”

  The first guy stepped back away and let his supervisor (was he that?) take over, which was too bad, since he’d seemed open to making the correction. Now I had the privilege of talking to this other guy, whose style of service had been a tad abrasive even with his last customer. “Well,” I said, “the first a needs to be an o. It’s the tiniest of changes …”

  “Everybody makes mistakes,” he replied, which I felt I could nod along with, except for its immediate postscript: “Why should I fix it? Because you say so?”

  “No. Because it’s wrong.” His logic had caught me off guard. Since everyone makes mistakes, there’s no reason to fix them? The ball bounced over the shortstop’s glove; why should the outfielder bother to run it down?

  “We’ll be sure to take care of that for you,” he said in a sarcastic and challenging tone. I couldn’t believe this guy felt the need to stare me down over a typo, but that’s what he’d decided to do. His jaw was set, and his eyes hard: full macho mode.

  “It’s just taking the tail off the a,” I reiterated.

  Again using a co
ntrary inflection, he said, “Thank you. Anything else?”

  I looked to Benjamin, who’d already picked out what he’d planned to drink. He shook his head no. We’d slake our thirst somewhere else. Sometimes you have to walk away.

  As disappointed as I felt for not fixing literally the easiest of all the typos I’d ever detected, Benjamin looked even lower. Apparently he’d expected a very different atmosphere, judging solely on the basis of the café’s poster about its slam nights. “Poets gravitate to places with the right atmosphere, man. That completely caught me off guard. What was that guy’s problem?”

  “His misspelling? Everyone makes mistakes, like he said.”

  “Yeah, everyone makes mistakes, but that doesn’t mean we all defend them.”

  And defensive was exactly what we’d seen, which brought me back to Albany and renown. As Benjamin and I began talking over the various responses we’d had over the last few days, we realized they’d covered a surprising range.

  Forget the typos. Mission aside, I’d taken a tour of basic human interactions. We’d seen a wide sampling of how people dealt with challenges, problems, or general requests made of them on a fundamental level. We’re fast approaching seven billion people on this little blue period in the text of the cosmos, and every day we bump into dozens of each others. Each interaction does not necessarily equate to one person wanting something from the other; sometimes they possess a common goal. (My mission was supposed to be the latter: enlisting people’s aid in improving their own surroundings.) When someone initiates an interaction with us, we have to decide how to react. I’d noted earlier how the customer service aspect that dominates many of these situations provided a basic script, but over the past few days I’d caught a lot more reactions of the unscripted variety. As human beings, how do we choose to react in that instant when someone walks toward us, smiles, and begins to speak?

  As I sat down to my blog, I couldn’t shake the Bridge Café guy’s skewed recognition that we all make mistakes. I titled my day’s entry: We All Make Mistakes. Now How Do You Deal? I played with the idea, but I felt fettered by the single day’s events. I couldn’t tell the whole story that way. Albany, Hanover, and Manchester felt like a family of experiences, much like the Three Bears (a simile that would win Jane’s approval). Papa Albany Bear had been too aggressive. Mama Hanover Bear had been gentle. And Baby, no, Teenage Manchester Bear had been juuuust … all over the place. Benjamin and I continued to debate motivations and explanations through the next day’s hunt, again in Manchester.

  With the renown guy, I’d had no hope right from the start. He’d immediately changed the discussion from focusing on the typo to the question of who’s right. Once we’d devolved into “I’m right and you’re wrong,” his position had become entrenched because his very identity—as the person who is right—was at stake. “That’s a huge thing that I see in customer service. When customers feel like they’re being told they’re wrong, they get hostile,” Benjamin added.

  The renown and gorganzola affairs had shared that confrontational defensiveness. “Why should I fix it? Because you say so?” “What school do you teach at?” They’d responded to my request by asking who I was to be correcting them. As much as I’d tried not to blame people for mistakes, focusing instead on the mistakes themselves, some people refused to let that distinction play. Anything they did became linked to their identity, and anyone who suggested the slightest tail-off-a-letter change to what they’d done became the enemy. I marveled at how, once again, tiny little typos had led me to a much larger communication issue, one that could apply across the broad spectrum of our daily experiences. Too often, we get stuck arguing from that perspective, placing egos like roadblocks into the situations. Perhaps I should have invested first in the appeasement of those egos, before even broaching the topic of the mistakes, with a sincere “How’s your day going?” In his book I’m Right, You’re Wrong, Now What? the clinical psychologist Dr. Xavier Amador sums up his approach to conflict resolution as, “Why would anyone want to listen to you if he felt you had not first listened to him?”

  So what about the other reactions we encountered? For some, the ambivalent nature of apathy rears its fuzzy-logic head. We’d already witnessed how apathy could be boon or bane for us, but now I could field effectively alongside that most infamous of all shortstops, I-Don’t-Give-A-Darn.* The prerequisite for apathy was creating a boundary line between oneself and the rest of the world. Once that boundary was set, apathy could take root, either from basic frustration at forces outside one’s control or from a consciously predetermined refusal to allow the outside any concern. Our Noodler represented the latter, and as soon as he identified us as “not my problem,” he could shoot us down with practiced ease. We didn’t even have time to state our relevance; we were interlopers, and we stood outside the boundary. On the obverse of the apathy coin, my ceasar-salad correction had been allowed because the woman hadn’t cared about the words that would be wiped away. Telling us yes had been the fastest way to resolve her sole concern: eliminating our existence from inside her boundary line.

  Still more intriguing to me had been our bookstore lady, who’d gone out of her way to lie for no reason we could nail down. She’d lied so consistently that I couldn’t even hazard a guess as to her motivation. I can’t be sure if this was the case, but Benjamin did observe, “There are people who have a problem with everything, no matter what. They argue for the sake of arguing.” Yet even if this explanation fits, how would such people get through an ordinary day? Does that kind of argumentative nature confer a feeling of superiority, or do the topics of argument truly feel that important to the arguer? It might come down to control, a narrow focus on insignificant details as the only controllable things (e.g., no customer’s going to tell me what to change in my store). Or by sticking to the molehills and minutiae, one gains an excuse for not facing the difficult mountains that do loom outside the kitchen window. (Uncharitable persons might claim this about the TEAL mission itself.) Beyond our speculations, I fear I haven’t the insight to definitively draw back the veil. Hudson’s Miracle on Main Street fiasco returned to my mind then, but that hadn’t been arguing for the sake of arguing so much as it had been a desperate groping for authority (the makers of the sign must know better than any of us; the dictionary will tell us; here’s a woman I work with, know, and trust).

  Not everyone had to react so negatively. I thought back to Hanover, where one guy caught himself passing the buck and took responsibility for it. He may not have created the typo, but he was there in the moment and could make the change happen. He’d even pointed out the brother typo of the one I’d caught, so we’d nabbed that one, too, working together. I considered that to be an excellent model to carry across life’s vistas of possibility. Who cares who made the mistake? I only care about how it gets fixed. Immediately following that one, I’d come upon the candy-store clerk, who turned a mistake into a teachable moment, the epitome of lemonade from lemons. At Molly’s, they’d rolled with our request so well that I had to revisit my thoughts about judgment, which Benjamin had shot down back in Chicago. While others might judge the mistakes and think less of a restaurant that had them, their response to our request had offered so much more vital information to judge them by. In showing such good humor and letting us correct the typos, everyone nearby feeling comfortable to join in the moment, they’d proven themselves. The very atmosphere that Applebee’s, T.G.I. Friday’s, and their ilk simulate in their advertisements actually existed here; we felt it. Thinking about it gave me a pang for Hanover like I hadn’t experienced even during my reunion.

  Topping it off, though, was our Benton Shoe lady. That had likely been her own apostrophe, placing her with the many Americans who lack apostrophic confidence. In the end, though, what mattered most about her was her creativity and easygoing nature, as she casually made one of the most inspired typo corrections of our entire journey.

  As if to screw the point deeper into the paneling of my head,
the next two days offered almost perfectly symmetrical experiences. Once each day, we spotted a sign from the car, parked, and went inside the establishment to speak to someone. Both people we told used an air of professionalism to cut our interactions short. In spite of those surface similarities, the results were radically different. Outside The Derryfield, a restaurant and nightspot that my mom had patronized back in the day, an LED sign flashed a string of red messages, including one that advertised PRIME RIB NITGHT. We had to wait as it cycled through a couple times, timing the moment right to get the picture, which we used as our evidence inside. A hostess grabbed a manager, who said he’d fix it and then walked away. The curt nod punctuating his sentence let us know he’d heard us and that the interaction had therefore concluded. Had we been lied to, or had he done it? We drove on for more typo hunting, and when we passed by later, we saw that the offending t no longer existed. Benjamin had offered a smile as he thought back and said, “That guy’s a pro. He might have seemed abrupt, but that’s the attitude of someone who gets things done.” That nod had probably reflected this latest item entering his mental to-do list, and I didn’t doubt that everything that went on that man’s list got crossed off.

  By contrast, in the second instance, our efforts received a “No … we don’t do that.” We stood inside a credit union, where the marquee outside advertised a HOME EQUTIY SPECIAL.

  I stared at the woman behind the desk, confused. I’d explained our mission and asked to borrow a ladder, but she seemed to be answering a different question. “Uh. Don’t do what?”