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I presented as natural a face as I could to the TV folks, but secretly I chafed with worry. Unsupervised, unobserved, TEAL could work at a languid pace if it so desired, and it was free to fail due to wrong turns or simple bad luck. Now, though, the pressure was on. I had to find typos, and quickly, or we’d look like fools. And we had to get at least some of them corrected, or we’d look ineffectual, pointless. The correspondent and the camera guy nodded to each other, and the film began to roll. I smiled nervously and jumped into the nearest souvenir shop.

My eyes scanned the displays, while Benjamin and Josh split off to do the same. Despite my nervousness, it took me all of thirty seconds to snare the first prey of the day for the League. Amid the commemorative sweatshirts and toy clapper boards, a small sign advertised Fine Art Monogram Souvenirs, whatever those were. In the text below the title lurked a classic mistake, one that we had seen before in a California ghost town three days prior: “Stationary,” when they’d meant Stationery. The sign was talking about notepaper, not standing in place. In normal circumstances I would have had the choice of either correcting the error on the sly or alerting the store manager, but the presence of my entourage made that choice for me. As everyone converged on me, seeing that I had found something, the manager materialized at my elbow.

“Uh … hi,” I said to her. “We’ve got ‘stationary’ here, and it should actually be spelled e-r-y instead of a-r-y. Could I go ahead and fix that?”

Everyone focused on the manager, including the all-seeing lens. She gave our company an uncertain look and decided that being accommodating on camera could only help business. “Sure.”

“Should be a pretty simple fix here,” I said reassuringly, markering out the offending letter and painting in an e with elixir.

“That’s a sign made by some stationery company,” the ABC correspondent said to me in disbelief (or at least an approximation of disbelief for the camera).

I nodded. “You’d think they’d be more careful, but … they’re not.”

As we continued our rounds, I thought about what physicists and psychologists term the “observer effect”: the changes that an observer inevitably makes on whatever she is observing, by the very act of observation. With the camera crew in tow, the reaction of each shopkeeper or clerk was automatically altered before I so much as opened my mouth. Sometimes the producer would hustle into a store to negotiate the right for me to enter the place, and often people would agree to corrections to appease the implied judgment of the video camera. Whenever the producer asked for permission to film us correcting typos, he was effectively asking permission for us to correct the typos as well. It was typo hunting through a skewed, La-La-Land lens, and it created its own reality.

The correspondent, the producer, and the cameraman converged with a request. That first catch was good, but could I think a little bigger?

Bigger? said I.

More visual, they clarified. They wanted a big ol’ booboo that would heighten our little drama. They wanted another one of those Benjamin’s-head-sized apostrophes, something that I’d need to splash with a pail of correction fluid.

“Er—sure,” I said.

Aiming to please, Benjamin and Josh and I turned our hawklike eyes to the garish landscape around us. We unearthed errors in T-shirt stands, marquees, cafés, and of course more souvenir places. Then we came to The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, where our ABC friends offered to buy us beverages. I walked up to the counter and SWEEDISH BERRIES jumped out at me right away. A chalkboard typo, easy enough to fix, or so I thought. The producer talked to the baristas and came to us shaking his head: no cameras inside. At this, the cameraman shrugged, noting that he would have no problem shooting from the outside in through the large glass exterior of the coffee shop, so he went out to position himself. I brought