The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [14]
“The Silver Diner’s in the same shopping plaza as another Filene’s Basement,” he said. “Jenny and I were thinking that those signs you found in Boston might have been sent from corporate. If we find the same signs in this one, we’ll know.” I started to sit up. “I mean, it’d be a cool mystery to solve, assuming you’re still doing this typo thing or whatever today.” My elbow on the sleeping bag slipped out from under me. “Do you need another hour to sleep?”
“No! No …” I struggled to pull myself up and get moving. I had to write the blog entry that I hadn’t gotten to last night. That might distract me from the profound unease that Benjamin’s words had provoked. Had he implied there might be days off on this quest? Or, worse yet, did he not understand that this “typo thing” of mine served as the foundation for the whole quest? I might stay in the same place two nights in a row and thus take a day off from driving, but never would there be justification for forsaking, even for a single day, the primary, sacred duty undergirding my entire journey. Had I somehow left this unclear to Benjamin? I needed to know now, but I feared the answer.
Last night’s typo yield had been meager. Storms had harried me all the way from Philly, making for a stressful drive, so I’d let my desire to kick back for an evening trump the typo hunting. Dining with my friends, I’d found three different spellings of raspberry (none of them correct) on the same menu, but nothing beyond that. What if Benjamin had fully understood the mission but, upon observing how casually I went about it, figured the terms were somehow negotiable? As I worked on the blog, my thoughts drifted back to when I’d first invited him along. I’d never explicitly said he’d be typo hunting with me every day, had I? I should have set the tone immediately yesterday when I came out of my car to meet him, should have shouted something like “Prepare yourself for transpositions!”
By the time the three of us made it to breakfast at the retro-style diner on Rockville Pike, they were serving lunch, but the wait promised to be short. “How many?” the host queried.
“Three,” Benjamin answered.
Three people walked in right behind us, and the man asked, “Are they with you, too?”
“No, we’re only this three.”
Benjamin’s plan had been to get a good meal in and then typo-hunt; however, my typo-sensitivity has no off-switch. Ahh, the chalkboard, its transience inviting typos to breed like larvae in old provisions. Sure enough, their dessert special left something to be desired, namely the second d in pudding. Glorious! I’d found one already, and I could demonstrate to Benjamin both how serious I was about my mission and how easily—
“Dude, I got one!” Benjamin whispered in my ear.
While I’d drifted over to my target, Benjamin had carefully examined the very first piece of text he’d encountered, a sign I’d walked past on my way to the chalkboard. No longer would I need to show him how distressingly common these reeking flotsam were in the tidal flats of our language: he’d just reeled in his first error.
Adding to the serendipity of our simultaneous find, Benjamin’s first collar turned out to be a double offender. The announcement listed the rotating events of a weekly local program for kids. We saw that the first event night of each month had its own problem. First they’d have “a Coloring Contests” and later