The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [42]
“And I’m pretty sure it’s too obscure for me,” Benjamin said, a strange testing look in his eye. “It’s all you.”
Yeah. I approached a clerk for help, explaining my purpose immediately so as not to offend her as I had the bookstore fellows. She came over to the case and examined the error. She’d obviously had more experience with minerals than I’d had in my short tenure at the magazine, and she immediately recognized the problem. It didn’t look right to her, she said. Ah, surely she possessed the very spirit of the League! I almost invited her to join our mission; her able eye could fix upon the most difficult quarry wherever TEAL might boldly spelunk. We conferenced on the correct spelling, and she opened the case so I could correct the error myself, even thanking me. Benjamin gave a silent nod of approval from the other side of the store.
Then we bought some gifts for our girls, and oh, I’d hate to impose any further, but my receipt had a problem. So did Benjamin’s. So had every receipt they’d ever printed from this cash register from the day the store had opened. At the top, under the store’s name, lay the address: 127 W. San Francesco St. A simple glance at the street sign outside, West San Francisco, proved the receipts in error. Benjamin hung his head as I pointed it out, but when the kind woman ringing me up said she didn’t know how to fix it, Benjamin ended the episode by requesting they “pass it along” and thanking them for everything. He figured that only the GM of the store would have access to what got printed on the receipts. They honestly could not change it then and there. “Not even the other store managers had access to the store personalization function.” I nodded as if I knew what that meant as we headed into another store.
After we’d admired some local artwork for sale, we struck up a conversation with a friendly young woman named Hailey near the shoe section. As she chatted about the city’s virtues, I began to realize how much I was enjoying myself here. Santa Fe would be added to the list of our favorite places, like Austin, that possessed their own character and felt real. Inevitably, though, a national franchise had infiltrated the town square, and Benjamin and I had watched, fascinated, as people dove into it, crowding the place as if afraid to venture from the haven manufactured for them by corporate America. I recognized that, yes, this street itself had probably been crafted as a capitalist simulacrum of a small town that had never quite been, yet it still had a sense of individuality brought to it by the independent businesses.
Hailey helped me pick out a cowboy hat and showed me how to set it properly ’pon my melon. When we left the store, I wanted to blurt out an observation about how much nicer these kinds of places were than the Walmart-ized communities or the strip malls featuring the same store names over and over again, some names so ubiquitous as to confuse any sense of navigating through a country. Which were you to believe? The odometer that said you’d come a thousand miles, or the storefronts before you with the same names you thought you’d left behind? Each new iteration would reveal unto you the exact same floorplan as its brethren back home, and you’d navigate flawlessly, as if you’d once visited this store in a dream. Before I spoke, though, Benjamin sighed and offered a thought of his own. “Not much text in that one. Too bad, we’d caught one