I have always loved to read. From the moment I picked up my first grade primer and read about David and Ann and their dog Spot I was hooked. I couldn’t wait until I could read real books and once I started, it became a lifelong love affair.
My love of reading led me to want to be able to express myself on the page as well as my beloved authors, who are too numerous to list. I loved doing English projects for school. It wasn’t homework to me. It was fun. The teacher would ask for a paper and I would come back with an illustrated pamphlet. I can’t draw worth a damn but I would always manage to find an artist willing to pitch in the art if I included a credit and I happily complied. I never failed to get an A.
Out in the work world I worked a time or two as a secretary. I hated it but I did like refining the business letters my bosses would write and ask me to type. I found that most people really couldn’t write a very cogent letter and I would rewrite what was given me and present it for a signature. The men who were my bosses, to their credit, didn’t get upset or chastise me. On the contrary, they appreciated it and it got to the point where I would be called in to the office and told what the gist of the letter should be and then I’d go write it. I wrote some great letters and made my bosses look good. Never did get a promotion out of it but that might be because I never stuck around long enough. I just didn’t like working in an office.
To me the written word is almost like a religion. To make the most of it, there are rules to make reading easier. Those rules are not only grammatical but also include punctuation. Which leads me to the main purpose of this little peek into my psyche. (I know, that’s a fragment and I should consider revising.)
I worked for a short time as a temp at the Metropolitan Water District in Los Angeles. It was a mind numbing job but it paid the bills until I could find something permanent. There’s a lot I could tell you about the MWD but I won’t. Suffice it to say that it was one of the most inefficient places I’ve ever encountered and I considered most of the people to be grossly overpaid for what they did.
My job with the MWD entailed a lot of typing and in those days, there were no computers or even word processors. I was fortunate to have an electric typewriter. I’ve never been a fast typist, nor have I ever been a particularly accurate typist. The people who made Whiteout had me in mind when they came up with that product. One afternoon I was given something to type and it had to be perfect: no mistakes corrected by the use of Whiteout. Not surprisingly, this was a daunting task and I had to type extremely slowly to make certain I didn’t make any mistakes but even so I did and had to start again. It took me several tries before I produced that perfect document.
About an hour after I’d sent the document downstairs, it came back to me with instructions to retype it because there was a mistake in it. I looked at the document but found no mistake so I called downstairs to ask what it was. I can’t remember what the sentence was but it was a listing of several things, those things being separated by commas. For example, I’d typed something along these lines: The dresses are available in blue, green, red, yellow and pink. My mistake was not having placed a comma after the word yellow. I informed the faceless woman on the phone in the bowels of the MWD that there was no mistake, that the word and negated the need for a comma. I was very polite about it but she wasn’t. She told me that it didn’t matter, there was a rulebook for the MWD and that rulebook stated that I had to insert a comma there, so that was what I was going to do! I told her no, I would not, the rulebook was wrong and should be corrected. She got nasty with me and I hung up on her. Then I called the temp agency and told them they’d have to find someone else for the job because I couldn’t work in an atmosphere where English wasn’t taken seriously. Then I left and enjoyed the rest of the afternoon.
I’ve wondered from time to time if they ever did get that document retyped.
