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View from the North 40: How it's funny and not funny

Not that I was hyper-critical before, but now that I'm hyper-sympathetic to errors, I find myself thinking - far too often - "Ha, ha, haw, hmm, ooooh, man, I feel your pain." It really is pain I feel in my heart-guts-brain area - even if it's a 6,835-mile-long error that lands you, your crew and 212 paying airline passengers on the wrong continent.

But we'll get back to that.

For a good handful, or two, of years a significant part of my job has been not only to not-make errors, but also to help the editorial team find and correct other people's errors (and pray to the gods of mistakes and the English language that I don't create an error while correcting them). And then get all this done on deadline no matter what.

All this hard (please add a childish pouty noise here, like "ha-a-a-rd") because I am not a natural finger-pointer or a natural details-person, or a fast thinker. Plus, I often enjoy the twist of an error like "days in jail" being written like "day sin jail" occurring (as if there exists a jail used only for people who have committed day-time moral transgressions. Get it?).

Since the job also means that the product is sent out to and scrutinized by the public, people notice when those mistakes are made, and there exists an elite few guided by a moral or intellectual responsibility, or a sense of delight, who call to say something like "You spelled 'received' wrong in a headline."

"Um, thank you," one might say, trying not to make it sound like a question. One might also try to keep oneself from scanning the entire paper to see how many times "received" was spelled right in the paper that the caller didn't take the time to notice, and then say to absolutely no one in the room, "I spelled 'received' right 17 times in that paper, you (bad-name-person)." Not that I've actually done that.

OK, yeah I did that. It probably makes me a bad person.

In general discussions with the public about errors - and, believe me, people like to discuss this - I have asked people how many times in a day they have dropped or spilled something, forgotten to call someone back, bumped into a desk, had to go back for keys or an important paper, mispronounced or forgotten someone's name, crossed an "I" or dotted a "T", transposed two numbers, or done any number of trivial or little or big things wrong in a work day.

Even when you are trying not to. It happens.

Now imagine that you had to publish an advertisement every day to show everyone in town that you did those things. Go ahead, take your time, think about it.

Now imagine that you were raised with one parent instilling in you an over-active sense of personal responsibility and the other parent driving home an over-active sense of guilt.

Welcome to my world.

I tell you these things not to make excuses, or gather sympathy, but rather to explain how it has tempered my ability to laugh whole-heartedly at some news items - which brings me back to the airliner landing on the wrong continent.

AirAsia pilots were supposed to be flying their passengers from Sydney, Australia, to Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, but they typed in the wrong starting coordinates and, after a madcap adventure in errors, ended up landing in Melbourne, Australia.

For the geographically challenged, imagine it like this: The main part of the Australian continent is a clock-shaped island-ish landmass, with that chunk of land from five o'clock to eight o'clock missing. The plane took off at the 4 of four o'clock and landed at the 5, but where the plane was supposed to be was all the way across the clock and beyond in an 8.5 hour flight to another country, on another continent almost 7,000 miles away.

This was bad, and it was laugh-out-loud funny, and it was made funnier by the fact that reports released Wednesday are saying that the pilots typed in the wrong starting coordinates, then totally shut off all on-board warning bells and whistles trying to tell them they were wrong, then panicked in the air trying to correct the mistake. Like in a slapstick comedy, they made a series of additional mistakes until the onboard navigation quit them. Then they had to get special permission to land in the totally wrong place.

And I laughed at the news, like most of the world who was not on that airline laughed. Then, mid-laugh I did what I always do now: I started feeling sorry for the people who made the mistakes, imagined how they felt and what they were going through and how their lives would be changed.

And then I couldn't laugh so much anymore.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that my job has ruined my life and tainted my sense of humor.

The pain is real, people.

(Yeah, that's my take-away at [email protected].)

 

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