The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [9]
“Uh-huh! I’ll talk to the project manager tomorrow.” She got rid of her last card and did a little dance. I had lost the hand, but I’d won a new traveling companion. Jane could now consider herself the fourth official member of the League, and first in my heart.
Somehow I’d suckered three other people into this demented trip, securing companionship for the majority of those thousands of miles on the open road. The final part of the trip, homeward across the Midwest and into the East, I’d have to do on my own, but by then I’d be back in familiar territory with folks that I could stay with along the way.
I’d made commitments. I’d secured arrangements. Now there was no denying the trip—the mission.
3 | First Hunt
February 23-March 4, 2008 (Somerville and Boston, MA)
Commences—with repast, drinks, and assorted merriments—the adventure of our Hero, Who boldly, singly, launches himself amidst familiar streets with unfamiliar steps. Though carrying forth his righteous Banner, yet our Knight of Orthography stumbles, beaten back by a disquieting storm of uncertainty.
I threw a going-away party for myself in February, about a week before my departure date. By combining it with the celebration of my twenty-eighth birthday, I created the can’t-miss event of the grim winter season. Kids love a themed birthday party, but my friends were in their twenties, so I skipped the He-Man party hats and centered on grammatical foibles instead. I set up a Typo Creation Station in the living room, where guests could make their favorite typos with alphabetical stickers, and I provided construction paper for cutting out states, real or metaphysical. I heard the back door slam as my reticent roommate fled the apartment, hours before the party was slated to begin.
Twenty-odd (or maybe just twenty odd) friends showed up, and they proved to be generous souls, showering me with gift cards and road tunes and other items useful for long months on the road. Jane and her sister gave me a snakebite kit and an exquisitely ugly dashboard hula dancer, both of which I would carry all the way around the United States without actually using. By the end of the evening my living room teemed with choice erroneous samples and all manner of cutouts, such as penises, snowflakes, and the obligatory silhouette of a naked lady. From the typos on the walls, apparently my friends expected me to run into a lot of tehs and you looses.
Jane took me aside during a lull in the revelry and squeezed me in her long arms. “Tell me again why Jeff-Bear is leaving me for so long,” she said.
“Somebody needs to fix America,” I said. The look on her face said she thought I was being facetious. I leavened my argument with specifics. “I think that I’m the only one who can ferret out these mistakes consistently, day after day. Or at least I’m the only one who cares enough to make it happen. I know that there must be hordes of typos skulking around out there, and that’s a big problem for everybody.”
“Why is it a problem, exactly?”
“It’s the creeping menace of carelessness!” I said, not even understanding the question. To me, the iniquity inherent in typos was as plain as a swath cut through virgin forest, or dog feces upon a white beach. It was like asking why armed robbery was a problem. “It’s a malignancy for which I am the lone salve.”
She sighed.
I knew in my marrow that the trip could make a palpable difference, perhaps even as much as the deeds of my old classmates. The specifics of how it would do that remained beyond my grasp. Maybe I’d need a few days on the hunt to figure it all out.
“Just get to Seattle safely, okay?” Jane said. “I don’t want to be all alone at the airport when I arrive.”
A couple drinks into the evening, the madness of what I was about to do struck me. I was about to leave all of these excellent friends behind for two and a half months, and my girlfriend for a month and a half, in the