The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [33]
He said, “Sure, if it’s wrong, we can fix it. Lemme see.” We stepped back outside to look at the blackboard. Then something astonishing happened—the man laughed. “Oh no, we close at seven Monday to Thrusday? And it’s all flowery and everything. I know who did this. Hold on, don’t fix it yet, I got to show Jerome this.”
He retrieved one of his co-workers, who, once shown the mistake on the blackboard, also had a titter over it. Then both of them reentered the store and came out a few seconds later with the employee who had probably made the error in the first place. She, too, was gracious enough not to get annoyed, even though her co-workers kidded her about it. Thrusday! We’d finally found some people who got it. They laughed again when we told them about our mission. Benjamin mentioned how little errors like this popped up everywhere, mitigating the sign writer’s embarrassment. Mimicking her flowery style as best I could, I swapped the letters and we made to depart, but the first guy told us to hold on for a moment longer, as he had a final errand back inside Margaritaville. Within two shakes of a tumbler, he emerged with a prize for us—a prize, for pointing out the mistake! We were now the beaming owners of a TIME FLIES WHEN YOU’RE HAVING RUM bumper sticker.
What a pleasant shift, we thought, from the latent hostility we had suffered yesterday in the Mobile mall. Here were employees who weren’t afraid of acknowledging mistakes. Granted, an alteration in chalk carried less grave potential consequences than fixing permanent signs, but the gratis token of appreciation had helped to make the distinction plain. This was what I’d hoped for, a friendly reaction to our quest, displaying humor and gratitude. Sure, I’d expected that many wouldn’t like being told they’d made a mistake, but I saw my efforts as a clear boon for humankind. Reactions like Margaritaville should thus have been more common, but they weren’t, making this one all the sweeter.
Benjamin checked his cell phone. “If you want to head back to the car so we don’t have to pay for another hour, now’s the time.”
I nodded, and we sped up, until one last typo blazed out at me from the window of a tourist center. “Dear God, that thing’s huge,” I said.
“Another hour it is, then,” Benjamin replied, following me into the place.
Inside, a middle-aged woman surrounded by pamphlets on various attractions and arcana of New Orleans ruled over a surprisingly large amount of office space. I deduced why the room was so big when I spotted a couple of Segways parked over in the corner—tourists would be able to fumble around open floor for a while before taking to the narrow streets. I went up to the woman and smiled. “Hello! We noticed that the word cemetery was spelled wrong on your sign in the window.”
She seemed dazed by this pronouncement, and her gaze didn’t follow my finger to the window. Instead, she gave both of us an uncertain stare. Pranksters? Miscreants? Even worse?
“It should have an e instead of an a,” said Benjamin, pointing at the reverse of the sign through the window. “See?” He helpfully plucked up a flyer that rendered the word with all three of its es.
“We’d like to fix it,” I said. “If that’s okay.”
She eventually looked at the sign. “Oh, you’re right.” Immediately she switched from wariness to staunchly supporting our cause. “Hey, we hired somebody to do those signs.” Ah, I hadn’t even spotted the second copy of the sign in another window. Double the error and potential shame brought upon the tour office. “We didn’t do those ourselves. We paid a lot to get them done, and hell, they didn’t do it right, did they?”
“We’re actually traveling the country correcting typos,” Benjamin said.
“It’d be nice to have this as another success story,” I said.
“Well, hold on,” said the woman. “I’m going to call someone right now to complain about this.” She picked up the phone and spoke to her supervisor without preamble. “Hey, you know those big signs we paid two hundred and fifty bucks each for? They’ve got a mistake. Two