Hold the front page! What was your worst mistake at work?
“It isn’t Leonardo DiCaprio in the film Tetris. It’s Taron Egerton,” Ian announced from the other side of our shared home office, while reading my piece last week about video games that had just landed in his inbox.
“Eh? What? No? Really? But… Gah!” I said.
I clicked on the Tetris film trailer again. Oh yes! Taron Egerton! In my defence, it’s a year since I saw the movie and he does look a bit like Leonardo DiCaprio. (And a bit like Matt Damon. A bit of each.) But yes, it is definitely Taron Egerton.
At least I hadn’t mentioned him in the headline.
I quickly amended the online version of my article on the Substack app, but thought of all those subscribers who’d just received it by email, containing an unfixable error.
Okay, so nearly a week on, only 1% of those actually clicked the link to the movie trailer, according to my stats. Maybe everyone else thinks it’s Leonardo, too.
I just found a 2016 Guardian interview with Taron in which he says, “A part of everyone wants to be Leonardo DiCaprio, don’t they?” So hopefully he’d be happy with my confusion.
It’s an easy mistake to make. But errors make me cringe. Every time I hit “Publish” on a new piece here, I invariably think of four things I want to tweak a minute later.
I thought about this again when I read
’s entertaining essay this week, titled How I messed up my first job:
In 1998 Faith was typing up cinema listings at the Press Association news agency for inclusion in various newspapers, including The Scotsman.
“If anyone other than Andrew Neil, then Editor, had taken his young godchildren to see the Rugrats movie when I’d said it was on (‘Sat/Sun only’) when it was in fact definitely not on (‘not Sat/Sun’) then I might never have learned from my mistake.
“But armed with the information in his own paper (loyal) he’d dutifully set out that Saturday morning with these two nippers, quite rightly expecting to enjoy the cartoon film at the time I’d printed. Sadly it wasn’t to be, and Andrew made a very heated complaint first thing on Monday morning, which my boss relayed to me with a shrug.”
A reminder that being a small cog in a big wheel still matters.
That took me back to the time I was production editor on Just Seventeen magazine in 1985. (I was also editing the fiction pages and writing features.)
Unlike most women’s magazines which were prepared months ahead, Just Seventeen had a very short lead time and went to press just before its weekly publication date. It meant it could be super-topical, but the rush to the print deadline was frenzied.
My diary entry for Wednesday 10th of April 1985 read:
“The magazine went to print today without the price on the cover. My fault.
“Bridget [the editor] noticed it and something was done, but it’s a very expensive mistake. Not so expensive as if she hadn’t noticed it early on in the run, admittedly.”
These days we’re used to desktop publishing. Back then, the typesetter glued the typeset elements – including the price (45p) – on to the layout. There was the possibility that, somewhere along the line, a bit of crucial text could literally fall off.
A couple of weeks later, I got a lift to the typesetters with the editorial director, David Hepworth.
“The magazine went to print without the price on it last week!” I told him.
“I know!” he said. He’d been part of the frantic behind-the-scene discussions on how to rectify it. It’s a sign of how naive I was that I thought it might have escaped his attention. It’s a sign of what a very cool boss he was that I did not get a rollicking. And if I hadn’t mentioned it myself, I don’t think he would have.
(I’ve written about how David Hepworth gave me my break on Just Seventeen when the magazine first launched in 1983 here.)
I learned my lesson and made a covers checklist (and re-check list) to ensure it never happened again.
I can’t pretend there was never another typo within the pages of the magazine on my watch, though. The process for getting an article to print was fraught with danger.
I typed copy on an electric typewriter onto foolscap sheets of paper like this:
You could see how many characters you’d got in a line and how many lines to a page, thus gauging whether the copy was the right length for the columns allotted to it by the designer.
The copy would be picked up each day by the typesetter. The typesetters would, with lightning speed, retype all the copy in the chosen font, font size and line spacing to the correct column width and print it out. (The “galleys”.) Those would be chopped up and pasted into position on the page, also at the typesetters.
A photocopy of the page would be returned to our magazine office in Carnaby Street for proof-reading. I’d send it back with corrections. There might be more proofs back and forth, depending on how many corrections were made and how much time we had.
I’d spend every Saturday afternoon at the typesetters in Farringdon checking the final proofs before everything went off to the printer.
One time, I added a missing word to a short story late in the process. When I made the final check, I noticed that in adding in that single word, the typesetters had reordered whole chunks of text when sticking it back down. If I hadn’t spotted it, it would have gone to print as a page of gobbledegook.
It was an excellent story I’d chosen from the large post bag of fiction submissions we received each week. I’d made a teenager’s day by telling her it had been accepted and that she’d be paid the going rate for it. (If I’m remembering correctly, we paid £90 per 1000 words, which in today’s money is probably more than most writers earn now!) I’d edited it and commissioned the illustration. I’d have been as mortified as the author if it had been published containing errors.
If I ever wondered whether my Saturdays at the typesetter made a difference, that convinced me.
My paranoia about potential typos only grew. And I’m still paranoid about them. If you spot any here, do let me know, so I can correct the online version!
What was your worst mistake at work? Do please comment below if you’re able. I love to read your feedback.
Still on the topic of publishing, I really enjoyed this article, Is Anybody In?, by a former journalist for The Scotsman,
. It’s about how he came to land his first job there in the 1970s, and the contrast between then and now.When he recently tried to contact The Scotsman with an idea for a feature, there was no phone number listed: “I’m a pretty retro guy and just wanted to speak to an actual human being, or even better an actual journalist.”
How hard could that be? Very, it turns out.
The Scotsman’s loss is Substack’s gain. I recommend reading Robbie’s article, plus his follow-up, titled Life and Death At Sea – which is what he wanted to write for The Scotsman – about how a breaking news story he was sent to report on in 1974 turned out to be about his own father being lost at sea.
Another piece I loved this week was by
on the girls’ comic Mandy, with its weird and wacky stories of girls triumphing over adversity.“Aside from your alien imposters, recurring themes included, blind girls forced to work for cruel and uncaring relatives, orphans forced to live with cruel and uncaring relatives, saving blind animals from cruel and uncaring relatives…”
Here’s the link to Sharon’s fun essay:
Thanks to everyone who read, liked and/or shared my piece last week about video games, Dreaming of Virtual Reality in 1992, and to those who shared their own memories. I was tickled by Heather Cawte’s comment about when she was doing teaching practice years ago:
“I was baffled when a child asked how to spell ‘egg’ and, after a while, ‘jog’, words that I thought were well within his abilities. All was revealed when I read his diary entry: ‘I went to Tom's house and we played Sonic the Egg Jog.’”
I’m really grateful to the 36 Substack writers who’ve recommended Wendy’s World to their readers since I started writing here in June. I’m blown away to have that level of support. Thank you.
At the moment, nothing on Wendy’s World is behind a paywall. I really appreciate some of you taking out a paid subscription to support my writing. Free or paid, though, I’m delighted to be sharing my writing with so many people. Thank you for reading!
I’ll take a week off over Christmas and be back in the new Year.
Until next time!
© Wendy Varley 2024
I once signed off the December issue of a magazine I worked on with
CRISTMAS ISSUE on the cover!!! 80,000 of the fxckers were printed and distributed. I got just one email pointing it out. Like you I remember cutting, gluing and worrying about character/line counts. The past is a etc. Great post. X
A great piece - as always!
It was the early 90s, and I was in my first job as an academic—a lecturer at a polytechnic design school. One of my tasks, along with a fellow lecturer, was to design, print, and distribute posters for the annual degree show. We worked hard on the design, and had several hundred posters printed. The centrepiece of the design was the phrase "Design Degree Show" in large, bold type. We set up shop in my colleague’s office to distribute the posters.
The process was simple but time-consuming: we rolled up each poster, placed it in a tube, and stuck an address label on it. With three of us working at a steady pace, we’d already managed to get a couple of hundred done. But as the deadline loomed, we started to feel the pressure.
Desperate to speed things up, we offered a passing student a tenner to lend a hand. He stepped into the office, looked at the stack of posters, and asked, “Isn’t there an ‘i’ in design?”
There it was, in massive bold letters: "Desgn Degree Show."
Hundreds of posters. Hundreds of tubes. Hours of work. And one glaring, career-defining typo.