From the Notebook: Three screw-ups
Posted: March 20th, 2008 | Filed under: Essays, Featured, Media | 51 Comments »
When I was 13 years old, I had my bicycle stolen. I went into a Revco Drug Store at Cedar Center in Cleveland for only a minute — a minute, that’s why I didn’t lock up my bike — and when I came out my bike was gone. I had saved up everything for that bicycle. It was my life. I’m pretty sure that was the last time that I ever violently cried. I hated the world. I’ve always understood how a stolen bike turned a young Cassius Clay into a boxer.
Funny thing, though, later that day I found out that one of my best friends had HIS bike stolen too. Same day. It was like a crime wave. And suddenly, in ways that even today embarrass me, I felt a little better. Not a lot. A little. Still … why should I have felt better at all when a friend’s bike got stolen; now we were both without bicycles and without the money or prospects to ever get new ones again. It seems to me that I should have felt much, much worse. You never know about emotions. I think, looking back, that it went a little bit beyond the whole misery loves company truism. I think I just felt a little less alone knowing that I wasn’t the only person who screwed up by not locking up my bike, not the only one to pay an entirely unfair price for it.
In that spirit, I want to write about three of my favorite professional screw-ups … maybe reading about these will make someone out there feel just a little bit better.
Screw-up 1: Magic Johnson.
I was 20 years old and had just started at The Charlotte Observer — it might have been my first day as an intern, in fact — when an assistant sports editor named David Scott said to me: “Magic Johnson is supposed to be coming to Belk to sign autographs; find out what time he’s coming.†Belk is a department store in Charlotte and throughout the South — sort of a Sunbelt Macy’s or Dillard’s or whatever — and a huge, huge advertiser in the Observer. This will become important later.
Anyway, I had absolutely no idea how to find out what time Magic Johnson was coming. I believe it took David about two hours to explain the basic concept to me (“This is a phone … these buttons here can be pressed in a certain order that will cause a phone at Belk to ring …â€). I nervously called Belk, talked to some woman who had absolutely no idea who Magic Johnson was or why I would be calling to bother her. After numerous, “Let me put you on hold†exchanges, I somehow extracted the nugget of information that Magic Johnson would be at Belk at 3 p.m.
“Magic Johnson will be at Belk at 3 p.m.,†I called across the room. I was quite proud of myself.
“Write me a note about it,†David said.
So, I took out a piece of paper — this is absolutely true — and wrote, “Magic Johnson will be at Belk at 3 p.m.†and handed it to him. David said, “What is this?†I said, “You said write you a note.†I’m pretty sure David thought I was being a smart ass. He did not know at that moment — could not know — the depths of my incompetence. This will become important later too.
“What am I going to do with this? No, you need to write me a NOTE, you know, the kind I can put in the paper.â€
Oh. OK. A note. Sure. Yeah, I knew that. Well, hell, I’d read newspapers before. I knew how to write a note. Sort of. I mean, how hard could it be? I sat down at the computer and wrote something like this:
“Magic Johnson, last year’s NBA most valuable player, will appear at Belk today at 3 p.m. to sign autographs. Johnson, who is known for his fancy passing and winning personality, will sign autographs on a first-come, first-serve basis. Johnson, who led Michigan State to the NCAA Championship in 1979 and has since led the Lakers to three NBA championships, is known for his fancy passing and winning personalities. He will sign autographs, â€as long as he can,“ according to a spokesperson for Belk. The autographs will be signed on a first-come, first serve basis.â€
When I sent this to David, I thought I saw his head shake slightly, but I didn’t think anything of it. He was no doubt at this point trying to figure out how to have that, “Maybe you should try another business, like something in the lawn-mowing field,†speech. In any case, he accepted the note, let me go home, it was a Friday night, and I think I had plans.
Saturday morning, 6 a.m., the phone rings. I was still living at home at the time, so my mother — not especially happy about the 6 a.m. call — handed me the phone. She said something like, “It’s your boss.†I did not even know I had a boss. I answered, and this was Gary Schwab, the sports editor of the Observer. I had not, as far as I can remember, ever spoken to Gary before. To me, now, this would be like, oh, I don’t know, working as an iPod salesman in an Apple Store in Des Moines and getting a 6 a.m. call from Steve Jobs.
“Where did you get that information about Magic Johnson?†was the first thing I remember hearing. Funny thing is, I didn’t think Gary sounded angry. Not at first. Just curious. I was so young and naive then, my first reaction was that this was just a normal call — maybe the sports editor always called young reporters at 6 a.m. to follow up on notes.
Me: Um, well, I called Belk.
Gary: You called Belk? You sure.
Me: Well, yeah.
Gary: And you talked to someone there.
Me: Um, yeah, a few people actually. I had to keep getting transferred and …
Gary: OK, I’m going to ask you an important question now. OK? What exactly did they say? I mean exactly.
Me: Well, they said that Magic Johnson …
Gary: OK …
Me: That he would be there signing autographs …
Gary: Right, fine.
Me: at 3 o’clock.
And then there was a long pause on the other side. Or maybe I’m just remembering the long pause for dramatic effect. Then Gary asked me the most sickening question I’ve ever been asked, a two-word question that even now makes me shake. He asked me: “What day?â€
What day? … What day? … That was a pretty good question. In retrospect — I thought as I sat on my bed and watched my entire journalism career flush down the toilet before it had even begun — this would have been a worthwhile question to ask of the anonymous Belk person.
The conversation was a touch one-sided after this:
Me: Um, I guess I didn’t ask that.
Gary: So why did you write that he was going to be there today?
Me: Well, I kind of assumed …
Gary: Because he’s not going to be there today. He’s going to be there Wednesday.
Me: Oh, um, Wednesday ….
Gary: And this is very bad because Belk is our biggest advertiser, and we need to know how to handle this.
Me: OK, well, uh
Gary: And we really cannot afford to make mistakes like these. Mistakes like these destroy newspapers.
Me: Um …
Gary: Especially when dealing with the newspaper’s largest advertiser.
Me: Um, right and…
Gary: Meet me at Belk.
He hung up then. At least I think he did. I know at some point, I was listening to a dial tone for a while.
So … I threw on a T-shirt, jeans, and rushed to Belk as quickly as my Pontiac T-1000 would go, which was not especially fast. When I got there, I saw David, I saw Gary, I saw someone else (this would be the managing editor) and all of them wearing suits. I suddenly sensed that I might have been a tad underdressed for this screw-up. Well, that’s the problem with screw-ups … you never know what to wear.
Gary sent me off into the men’s department to wait while the Observer people met with Belk officials to figure out exactly how to deal with the Magic Johnson crisis. I may have gotten a few of the smaller details of this event wrong, but I remember one thing very, very clearly. I was standing there, leaning against a table with khaki pants piled on it (the sign said $19.99, which I thought was pricy) and I had this powerful thought, a thought that at that moment seemed profound to me, a motto for growing up. I wrote it down on the back of a business card that I still have somewhere. It went like this:
“When I used to screw up, it mean that I put milk on top of the eggs when bagging groceries. Now when I screw up, people from all over Charlotte mindlessly come to Belk looking for Magic Johnson.â€
After what seemed like roughly 30 days in solitary confinement, Gary came over, put his hand on my shoulder and said: “OK, well, here’s the deal. You obviously messed up here. I can’t make you do this. But here’s what I want you to do: I want you to stand in front of Belk this afternoon, and when you see someone who is coming to see Magic Johnson explain to them that there was a mistake in the paper and that you apologize and that Magic will be here on Wednesday.â€
Maybe it was a test. Maybe it was a concession they had made to the Belk people. Maybe Gary saw it as an opportunity to teach a young kid a lesson. I don’t know. All I do know is that afternoon, I stood in front of Belk and stopped people, told them that I had screwed up, that Magic wasn’t coming, that I obviously wasn’t cut out for this newspaper business, that I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life now, that I was thinking about radio but I didn’t think I had a good radio voice … and so on. Some were very angry. Some were understanding. Some ended up trying to make ME feel better. It was humiliating, of course. And cathartic. I never made that mistake again. I learned that with reporting comes responsibility. And I found a nice polo shirt on sale.
* * *
Screw-up 2: Shaq
This is a much simpler screw-up. I was working in Augusta, and I decided it would be fun to writing a fishing column. I had never caught a fish in my life, though this wasn’t especially surprising considering that I had never actually gone fishing. I thought it might be amusing to go fishing with Bill Baab, who had been outdoors writer in Augusta since the Reformation and who, conveniently, was also the world’s No. 1 authority on puns.*
*It was Bill, a very nice and somewhat guileless man, who wrote the famed Masters headline, “69 Cures Woosnam’s Woes,†though as funny as the headline might read, it was much funnier the next day as two editors tried to explain to him exactly WHY this was not an especially appropriate headline.
Anyway, you may or may not know this, but apparently real fishermen want to start at like 5:30 a.m. or something like that. The strategy, apparently, is that irritable fish are easier to catch or something. In those younger days, I preferred the “Go to bed at 3:30, wake up at noon†type of schedule. Unfortunately, going to bed at 3:30, waking at at 4:30 did not make for an especially restful evening. Spending six hours in the Georgia sun listening to an old man recite puns (“There are the terns. And you know, one good tern deserves another,â€) did not help matters. When I got back to my apartment, I was at a different level of exhaustion than I had ever felt before. You know those scenes in the movies where the hero is walking through the desert muttering, “Water! Water!†and then finally collapses in the sand. Yeah. Like that.
It should be pointed out there that I was scheduled to write a column about South Carolina playing basketball against LSU that evening, a 7 p.m. game. Shaq was playing for LSU then. So it was supposed to be a column about Shaq.
But I needed rest. I set my alarm for 4 o’clock., which was honestly pushing it — it would take me a good 2 hours to get to the arena in Columbia — but I had to get some rest. Then I collapsed into a state of unconsciousness.
Have you ever had this moment when you wake up, and it’s dark outside, and you’re entirely confused? Why is it dark? The clock says 8:32 … it shouldn’t be dark at 8:32. Maybe it’s raining. But, no, it’s not gray, it’s really dark, like night time dark. Maybe there’s an eclipse. No. That’s ridiculous. Come on. Figure this out. Maybe the world is coming to an end. Yeah. there was a laser and someone fired at the sun and … I wonder if that’s how the world would end … by it being dark at 8:32 in the morning. Hmm. Very strange. Morning. Hmm, wait a minute. Maybe it’s not morning. Right. That’s an interesting theory. Not morning. But if it’s not morning then why does it say 8:32 a.m.? Oh, wait, there’s another 8:32 …what do they call that again? Oh yeah, 8:32 p.m.
OK, but if it’s 8:32 p.m., that means I slept all day. Could I really have slept all day? I don’t really see how. I set my alarm … oh wait. I wonder if i set my alarm for 4 a.m. instead of 4 p.m. like I should have. There’s that crazy a.m./p.m. dichotomy again. Hmm. Well, why did I set my alarm in the first place. Oh yeah, I’m suppose be at a game …
HOLY#&$%*#@(*$! I’M SUPPOSED TO $&#*$*# BE AT THE #@*&$^@%@ GAME!
Then there was some quick math:
OK, it’s 8:34 now. I could get dressed in 3 minutes. That would make it 8:37. It would take my Ford Escort roughly 98 minutes to get to Columbia if at my absolute top speed (63 mph). That’s, um, like after 10 p.m. The game would be about 40 minutes over. OK. That’s not going to work. Maybe I can buy a helicopter. No. How can I buy a helicopter? I can’t even afford a full carton of Ben and Jerry’s. Maybe I can, um, no, I’m dead here. I’m really dead here.
And then there was the planning of the call to the office.
OK, I can say I’m sick. No. Why would I be calling this late to say I’m sick? I was unconscious. Well, technically true, but no. I had a stroke. No. OK, I can tell them the truth. What’s the truth? That my alarm didn’t go off? I wonder if anyone has ever used that excuse before? My car broke down? OK. That’s possible. It broke down on the road, and I had to work 2 hours to find a phone. OK. This is before cell phones. In fact, what is a cell phone? I wonder how small they’ll get. Why the hell won’t I be able to buy an iPhone in in 15 years anyway? Because I’m a Verizon customer? Is that fair? What the hell is Verizon doing. No, enough, of that, I have to tell them the truth. I overslept. I missed the game. They might understand. They know Bill Baab …
They did not understand especially, no. But I think they were amused enough by my incompetence to not fire me.
* * *
Screw up 3: Blown up.
This was actually a little earlier than screw-up 2, and it’s the simplest and most innocent of them all. I was working in Charlotte, and I was covering the unveiling of the new baseball stadium in Fort Mill, S.C. It was one of those days when politicians and business leaders show up to christen the public works project, they wear hard hats, they pretend like they’re actually working and helping build the thing.
George Shinn was, at the time, owner of the Charlotte Hornets NBA team (I guess he’s still part owner of the New Orleans Hornets) and also owner of the Charlotte Knights baseball team. I knew him a little bit. I talked to him for the story, talked to a mayor or two, and then I wrote it. The story was fine, except that in the middle it had a rather interesting passage which, to the best of my recollection, went something like this.
“Everyone wore hard hats. Speeches were made. And then George Shinn and other dignitaries ceremoniously screwed in the first two seats.â€
In case you did not pick up on it — I’m sure you did — the passage would have appeared in the newspaper looking like this.
Everyone wore hard hats. Speeches
were made. And then George Shinn
and other dignitaries ceremoniously
screwed in the first two seats.
And in case STILL did not pick up on — as I still did not when I read the next day’s paper — the passage was helpfully blown up to about 200 times its original size and hung in the office of the managing editor, a man named Doug Clifton who would later become the editor of my hometown Cleveland Plain Dealer. It’s no wonder I never got a job there. The passage looked like this:
Everyone wore hard hats. Speeches
were made. And then George Shinn
and other dignitaries ceremoniously
screwed in the first two seats.
I got it then. It’s a wonder that I’m not selling World’s Finest Chocolate bars for a living.
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Great stories; and you’re right, hearing other people’s screw ups does make you feel better about your own.
Woo whee Joe, that’s some pretty funny stuff. Thanks for giving me another reminder that even the best writers take a while to become that way.
I found your blog a few weeks ago, and have been reading the hell out of your very, very long archive. It’s ironic, and just cool, that I go to your blog today and read your first post (above this one) about how knowing something human about an otherwise nebulous person can really get you to like them. This post really drove that home. You just picked up a loyal reader for life.
Keep it up, you have become the best part of my lunch. Really.
Also, thanks.
Great stuff. We can’t be afraid to make mistakes, as long as we learn from them.
As a former newspaper guy myself, Joe. These mistakes are really funny and hit very close to home.
Good show.
BTW, more tales from the newsroom would be terrific.
Famous headlines from the paper where I work:
Deviant Yugoslavs protest
Japanese have a language all their own
I thank God every day I didn’t write either one.
I laughed harder at story #3 than I have at anything in a long time. Just like the Woosnam headline, you almost can’t blame the person who wrote it because only the reader, interpreting it THAT way on purpose, gives it the unintended hilarious meaning. Three “Screw” ups indeed, and I do feel better. That’s probably because I was laughing so hard.
That last story killed me. It almost matches the dictation I transcribed when I worked i the medical field:
“Patient seen last night while I was tied up by Dr. Smith.”
Nothing like a dangling participle.
The worst in our paper’s (The Green Bay News-Chronicle, RIP) history – thank whoever, not my personal history (I’ve had the wrong team winning in headlines, though) was this: (and I undeleted the deleted words);
A sportswriter had rewritten a press release about a meeting of the waterfowl preservation group Ducks Unlimited. While practicing on the new equipment, he typed in a paragraph as a joke for the editor who would read it.
Suffice to say it suggested the group’s only accomplishment had been “messing up the landscape” with “a lot of goddamned duck shit.”
Instead of “delete,” he hit “send.”
(Editor Tom) Brooker said he got a call from (publisher Frank) Wood the next morning, and the publisher ordered his editor to read the story. Aloud. “And all they’ve accomplished is to mess up the … oh, sweet mother of God!” Brooker said.
“Exactly,” Wood replied.
To this day, the issue remains the only one ever to sell completely out. By 9 a.m.
The folks at Ducks Unlimited, bless them, were able to laugh. The writer got a week’s suspension (would have been longer, but he was needed), and the paper managed to make duck salad out of duck leavings.
(Editorial cartoonist Lyle) Lahey, never missing a trick, had his cartoon ready: a duck, in hipboots and a scowl, picketing the building which carried the motto: “The News-Chronicle: The Friend of the Duck.”
Which the folks at Ducks Unlimited commissioned for table centerpieces at their next dinner.
I’d been “in journalism” for about a month, when I was sent to cover the County Council’s budget meeting … Okay, I can do this. What’s a budget? I’d had one class in journalism, never written for a school paper, nothing.
This is back before electronic archives. I dutifully listen to the meeting, I get the “millage rate” — whatever that is — and I compare it to last year’s story, and then did the math wrong.
I turn in my story, it’s an afternoon paper, and the banner front page says “County Millage Rate Down 5 percent” …. I had the next day off.
So I get out of bed around noon, eat lunch, then stroll down to the convenience store for some beer. And there’s the next day’s paper on the rack … this time, the banner headline reads, “County Millage Rate Up 5 percent” …
My story was Sooooooo wrong, and there was soooo few ways to explain it, they just quietly rewrote the entire thing and ran the correct article the next day.
No one ever said a word about it.
From then on, I learned, ask the county manager to explain all the numbers to you, and ask him, no matter how stupid you sound, “is this a tax increase, or decrease.”
Ohmygoodness, good stories, Joe. I know I giggled.
The “screwed in the seats” story reminded me of the only time in my life I got to sprint into the press room and holler “Stop the presses!”
I was the nighttime news editor of the Naples Daily News, and one of the last jobs of the evening was to grab the fresh paper when the presses started running and look for glaring mistakes that the understaffed desk had missed. That day, there was a golf tournament in town, and Jack Nicklaus was playing. Apparently, he had a bad round that afternoon.
I walked into the backshop, and immediately saw two of the camera operators snickering over the paper. This is never a good sign.
One of them, Kelly, holds up the front page of the Sports section, which has a giant three line headline that reads:
JACK
OFF
TARGET
“Since when is masturbation a sport?” Kelly asks.
Joe,
You would have been sitting next to me at that SC-LSU game. We kept looking at the empty chair all night, hoping you hadn’t died…
Hey, Joe! Here’s how I remember it: I get up, see the item in the paper and I realize we’ve got the wrong day … I throw up … then I call you. Actually I think we had talked once before after you had dropped a fly ball in the media league. Anyway, it was just me (no tie) and you at Belks. A bonding moment. A Joe Adcock guiding a young Chico Salmon moment. Think it went like this when people showed up: “Hi, I’m the sports editor and this is the guy that screwed up. His name is Joe and he’ll be famous someday. But not today.” Glad you remember.
This one is my favorite, especially with the photo:
http://www.guppylake.com/nsb/headjob.html
Great stuff, and I’d love to hear more from those brave souls willing to share their stumbles. My biggest gaffe was nearly 10 years ago when, as a graphic artist working in Arizona, I created an incredibly simple map of Arizona that did nothing other than locate Phoenix. So there it was, an outline of Arizona, with a little dot labeled Phoenix. Easy, right? I gulped the next day when I saw the map and realized I’d used the outline of New Mexico …
Remember this one, Poz?
Cowboys’
Turner
eager for
head job
“… a two-work question that even now makes me shake …”
Some things change; some things remain the same.
Joe, anyone who reads the Sports section with frequency knows that the dim, bitter sportsters CANNOT get time references right. I wouldn’t beat yourself up too much; you’re just part of the crowd with that type of mistake.
Back in the 70s, a University of Arkansas football player was charged – and then tried – for rape.
A young and naive reporter – The Arkansas Democrat only had two varieties, old and senile, and young and naive – was sent to cover the trial.
At some point, as you would expect in a rape trial, the actual sexual act was described.
From that description, the young reporter said the football player forced the woman to had anal sex.
That, unfortunately, was not correct. The football player – who contended that the act was consensual – described the sex as “doggie style.”
Now, I promise you, that was a correction that should be framed and hung on the wall.
I was editor of my college paper. We had several screwups on what was, overall, a pretty good paper for a weekly at a college with no journalism major.
My favorite f-up was the placement of a public service ad, one from Mothers Against Drunk Driving that we’d use to fill space. It showed a car filled over, though I don’t remember the caption.
Next to it was a headline from the sports section, “Squash Team Hits Victory on Road.”
Love the stories Joe, and I can relate.
I was 23 or 24. I had been on the job for about a year, but this particular day found me in a face-to-face meeting with one of my customers in a board room setting. I knew all of the people in the meeting from having spoken to them over the phone numerous times over the previous year, but this was my first time meeting them in person. There were 15 of us, but only 14 chairs at the roundtable. One older lady named Debbie agreed to sit in a chair in the back of the room that wasn’t part of the roundtable. A gentleman offered to take that seat instead, but Debbie said it wasn’t necessary. I chimed in without skipping a beat.
“Yeah don’t worry, Deb likes it in the back.”
Oops. Where was I even going with that? I have no idea. 10 minutes of red face followed though.
Best of high school sports journalism:
“Girls Soccer Sloppily Masters Bates”
We had a really witty sports editor, and only caught the joke when someone saw the proof hanging on the wall and fell over laughing a half hour before press time.
In college, I worked in the produce department at a grocery store. The back room where we unpacked deliveries wasn’t that large, so we’d throw the empty fruit boxes onto the top of storage room that adjoined it to get them out of the way. From time to time, we’d throw a box too far, and it would land on top of the room in the store’s deli department where they cut up meat.
Now, produce boxes in a college town are in great demand, because they’re perfect for students who are always packing for a move. We’d get requests for our empty boxes a lot, and would climb up on top of the storage room to retrieve them.
I hadn’t been there that long when I was asked to go up there to grab some boxes one morning, and I noticed a box that had been thrown onto the ceiling of the deli room instead. Wanting to be a diligent employee, I went to get it. It wasn’t until I stepped off the top of the storage room (solid surface) and onto the insulation-covered ceiling of the deli room that I noticed the wooden plank running across the top of the deli.
A plank that I had neglected to walk on.
I didn’t quite have time to figure out the reason the plank was there before I plunged through the suspended drop ceiling I had foolishly put all of my weight on and went crashing into the knife-filled deli cutting room below.
Thankfully, the only person staffing the deli that morning wasn’t cutting meat at that moment, so I didn’t land on anyone. On my knees on the floor of that room, I took a quick inventory and realized that the bin full of knives and shears that my feet had overturned on the way down had mercifully missed me (though one still-quivering knife was embedded in the wall to my left). I stumbled out of the room in a dust cloud of wrecked ceiling tiles and insulation, humiliated but otherwise unscathed.
My boss was far more understanding than I thought he would be, and I didn’t lose my job. I did, however, gain the nickname “Crash” for the remainder of my time there.
I love these stories thanks for sharing. On an unrelated note, thanks to some unscheduled surgery I finally have had the time to crack open my copy of The Soul of Baseball and I love it. It’s a great read that I will be recommending to friends. I especially love the way you capture Buck O’Neil’s love and knowledge of jazz.
I got called away before finishing that thought. As a baseball fan with only a surface knowledge of jazz I felt like I’m getting an education in two subjects from the book.
A recent contribution:
The reporter who was assigned to the story spoke by telephone with Hillary Wicai Viers, who is a communications director in U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson’s staff. According to the reporter, when Viers answered the phone with ‘‘This is Hillary,’’ he believed he was speaking with the Democratic presidential candidate, who had made several previous visits to the Mahoning Valley.
The quotes from Viers were incorrectly attributed to Clinton.
http://www.tribune-chronicle.com/page/content.detail/id/503067.html?nav=5021
TWICE I have accidently used public women’s bathroom without realizing it until I got out of the bathroom. Well, once I wasn’t exactly out of the bath room,my sister and three of her friends walked in as I was walking out. The other was at KCI, and my wife was waiting for me with the camera.
Was sent to my first big inter-agency meeting to represent my boss and the agency where we worked.
Not much had come from the meetings so i was sent to just gather information and report back to my boss.
To everyone’s surprise -there were some major decisions and it was real important for me to get back with the CEO (3 steps above the supervisor who sent me).
Met with my boss -told him what occurred and he then took me to the CEO’s office to share the info with him.
Around 3am that night i realized i made a huge mistake when sharing the info….I reported the contact person for the other agency was Graham Russell.
Graham Russell is one of the guys from Air Supply. Why that name came to me i haven’t a clue.
Joe,
Great stuff. I teach middle school journalism and am going to show this to the kids.
-Jerry
Joe – thanks for sharing! This blog gets better all the time.
I was howling with laughter at the last story so loud that my roommate had to stop in to find out.
That was great. Thanks for the stories, Joe.
I do remember the time I ‘napped’ for 10 hours and missed picking up a friend from the airport. He didn’t mind taking the taxi but he wasn’t happy at having to wait an hour or so (since this was before cell phones) and not being able to contact me at home.
I loved the stories — especially the second one. I can completely relate to waking up disoriented, thinking the world is about to end.
Oh, and I have to give props to DrBear (commenter #9) and his “Ducks Unlimited” anecdote — I laughed so hard, I cried.
Your posts are doused in awesomeness.
Gawd. Kinda like the time I was doing a 1-hr.- deadline concert review of Whitesnake, those lovely English lads — a snarky review, it should be noted — and “remembered” that the lead singer’s name was Roger, not David, Coverdale. And wrote same for the misedification of 300,ooo readers, several of whom called or wrote to gently correct me, and speculate on whether I had actually been at the show.
I was stunned that so many Whitesnake fans were loyal readers — and writers! I finally had to ceremonially burn the most poisonous letters in a fairly futile attempt to expunge the shame…my editor, bless him, didn’t fire my then-freelance ass— and not just because I worked on his motorcycle, I don’t think…
I don’t think I can fully explain my biggest work screwup with text so you’ll just have to use your imagination. It involved me in my college years sleeping through an alarm clock I was using while on the clock and a giant pile of grain. My screwup was compounded when my boss had a screwup of his own while helping me clean up my mess. The screwup was big enough that the mess spilled into the next shift.
Love the blog Joe.
Great stories, Joe. Must be a coincidence that I stumbled across this headline today: “New SNM Grants Focus on Junior Medical Faculty”
http://new.reillycomm.com/imaging/makingheadlines_print.php?id=4468
My favorite correction of all time came when a transcriptionist misheard a passage in a TV interview with William Bennett, and the mistake got used in some print publication (I want to say Parade Magazine, but don’t quote me on that). The correction went something like “Bennett said ‘It’s a real us-and-them thing,’ not ‘It’s a real S&M thing.’ “
The best one at my old paper was done by a copy editor who was too clever for his own good. A guy named Joe Dick won a local golf tournament. The banner headline (slow news day) said:
Steady Dick does the trick
I felt better, too. Made me realize my big three:
1) Hurriedly throwing a bright gold scarf around a sharp black suit then walking into a meeting with Indiana University President Myles Brand and other high-level college administrators. Of course, their longtime rival is Purdue University: colors, black and gold.
2) I once called a waste water management source who was apparently on vacation and had a relative — unbeknownst to him — staying in his home. The relative passed himself off as the official. I literally had no idea that I wasn’t talking to the right person: his answers were great! When the real official returned, he called me originally thinking that I had made the entire interview up. BUT I HAD NOTES! The confusion was hilarious and he actually wound up taking it all very well before changing the locks on his house.
3) My first job in college, when I was young and naive, involved a man who was killed in an accident while he was driving and his wife was “pleasing him orally.” That’s what the police statement said, and so I just thought they were kissing. I PROMISE! I wrote the story as a straight vehicular accident, but when our competing afternoon paper came out and reported the real reason the man lost control of the car and ran into a pole, I wanted to quit my job and never show my red face again. My editor, knowing I was a pastor’s daughter (a good one), did his best to try to understand what oral sex was. SO FUNNY.
I remember a story with the woman who did typesetting duties at my hometown paper once upon a time.
there was a story about some legendary town drunk who every now and again would drink to the point of getting sick, he’d call the cops to say he was dying and they’d bring him to the emergency room.
Only this last time it turns out he actually was dying, and the paper reported his final words to the two cops who brought him to the hospital that final time: “well boys, I guess I won’t be coming in here anymore.”
So far so good. But when it appeared in print, this typesetter found out she dropped the second ‘e’ in here, giving a little different spin to his last words.
She said the reporters presented her the clip inside a frame.
joe,
absolutely NO ONE can tell a story like you. you could talk about paint drying and it would be just as great.
you remind me of that famous barry lamar bonds quote – “secret? there’s no secret. it’s talent and you can’t teach talent.”
smile
no wonder he likes you.
Being a journalist, this is very comforting to hear. We all screw up every day in stupid ways.. sometimes I feel like I’m doing something wrong every day. I can’t wait until I’m the editor that can smile at the intern that forgot to plug in a date
Hey Joe,
Thanks for the Bill Baab memory.
Stu
Say, Joe, are you the one who couldn’t follow the rules after the NCAA title game and tried to ask the coach a question while the players were at the podium?
I didn’t quite catch the name, but it sounded like yours.
If it was you (and notice I’m saying if), then I have to ask: Do you realize you made a doofus of yourself on ESPN?
Black Friday…
A bargain is something you can\’t use at a price you can\’t resist. -Franklin Jones
) Happy Holidays!…
The two screw-ups I remember most clearly have to do with mis-typed words. The first was my own and the second was in a competitor.
I covered a high school football game in a town about an hour away from my paper. I didn’t bring the computer as this was in the days when sending a story via computer was not he easiest thing to do and figured getting back to the office and banging one out quickly was a better option. The problem on this evening was two-fold: First, it was a rainy evening, making driving the two-lane roads back to my paper more difficult. The second was the game went into overtime … three overtimes actually.
By the time the game ended and I got my few quotes (how else to prove you were actually at the game?) I got in my car and drove as fast as I could back. By the time I reached the paper, I had something like 20 minutes to bang out the story. I had a reputation for working well on deadline with very few mistakes, and the editor had plenty of other stories to proof, so he let mine go without looking at it.
One of the key moments in the game came when one of the team’s running backs broke into the clear and tried to make a cut. But, because of the rainy weather and this was a high school stadium, the field was sloppy and he slipped. Well, ever notice how the “f” and “d” keys are next to each other on the keyboard? This is important as the sentence, “White appeared to have a path to the end zone only to slip on the wet turf” turned into, “White appeared to have a path to the end zone only to slip on the wet turd.” Fortunately we caught it in time for the second edition, but I imagine some people reading the story thought the field must have been REALLY sloppy.
The other was a photo cutline in a competitor’s paper hyping a Sesame Street on Ice production coming to town. It showed various Sesame Street characters in the photo and identified them by name. When it reached The Count, it left out the “o” in Count. I think people looking for THAT character were a tad disappointed if they went to the show.
JoPo – you forgot 1 screw up. “Roy is staying”
Joe, clearly your problem is with current or future Lakers. I’d avoid accepting any assignments involving Kobe Bryant.
I guess I’m fortunate, or maybe shameless, but I’ve never been badly embarrassed at work, or at least at my day job. See, a long long time ago, I was working at the huge San Francisco Renaissance Faire (while living in Los Angeles). I and two co-workers were given a reward/perk: we were told to leave Faire early on Sunday, go to the Castro Street Faire in costume, and hand out fliers. This was a perk because we would be paid extra to go do this, we got to keep the canvas bags we used to carry the fliers (I still use mine once in a while), and it gave us a two hour head start on the drive back to LA. In the normal course of events, I got separated from the other two guys. Just could not see them. It was then that I realized I was completely lost, I was in a city where I knew zero people’s phone numbers, I had six dollars in my pocket, I was in the midst of 100,000 screaming heavily out of the closet gay people, I was wearing tights and slops and other things Elizabethan, and I was far far far from the most flamboyantly dressed person there. I had a few seconds of sheer unadulterated terror, then decided that whatever happened, I was being paid to hand out fliers, so I swallowed the fear and kept on keeping on. I found my friends a block or so further on, and I’ve never been embarrassed by anything ever since.
In college, we ran a series of stories about the need for a new arena on campus. The headline for the athletes’ perspective story: “Jock’s itch for new arena” It was late, we were young.
Ah Joe – the Augusta days. I worked with you then. Thanks for the laughs!
Hi, Joe, great story! Hope you’re doing well and thanks for the reminder of the good ol’ days in Augusta w/ Bill Babb and the gang. He used to regale me with stories of his pet turtles thanks to my Augusta nickname (which I don’t hear very often anymore.)
Rob – aka Turtle
I worked for my college newspaper for three years, the last of which I was editor-in-chief. My favorite screw up of all time thankfully happened before I became editor. I was just a reporter at the time and heard about this secondhand, and it was never quite clear who was responsible for it.
Our paper printed a list of announcements and events around campus every week, and one week there was a presentation titled “Jerusalem: 3,000 years of holiness.” Whoever had typed the events that week instead used the headline “Journalism: 3,000 years of holiness.” Our professor was not happy, but we at the paper were delighted by it, and later had “Journalism: 3,000 years of holiness” t-shirts printed.