The New English

This week started out rough. I get to work Monday morning and my good friend Lee has left a copy of the December newsletter on my desk with a note on it: “Did something go haywire?” My stomach flipped.

Apparently, something went wrong with the art file I sent to the printers and some of the punctuation marks were converted into strange symbols. This happened somewhere between the first and second proofs I saw, and unfortunately I didn’t catch it. Thus, the newsletter was mailed to about 12,000 members with strange symbols taking the place of apostrophes, quotation marks and colons.

This is a marketer’s nightmare: to print and distribute something loaded with errors. And even though it was a simple mistake and obviously a glitch of some kind, it is totally embarrassing. Luckily I was feeling very Zen that morning and didn’t let it faze me too much. After all, we all make mistakes and I’ve made worse than this (I’ll leave those stories for another time). Laurel and I decided to call the errors “the new English," kind of like the “new Math”. Who knows, maybe it will catch on!

Seriously though, I am taking the situation seriously and will work my hardest to make sure it doesn’t happen again. My printer has also agreed to share the responsibility since the error was made in the proof stage. So, life goes on…