I Spy

When I was young, I thought that I was going to grow up to be a proofreader. I was good at spotting mistakes in text, and I enjoyed it well enough. Then I started to find out what dreary and soul-crushing lives many proofreaders lived, and decided to head elsewhere.

My proofreading skills have come in handy in other jobs: a prepress technician, a small town newspaper employee, and certainly as a programmer. I still can use that eye to catch out-of-place semicolons or missing equal signs. I was surprised, though, by what I used it for the other day.

We've been working on a website for a client who sells a wide variety of products, including some they brand themselves. As I was doing some testing of the website, I was looking at a page for some soup that had an interesting old school label. I zoomed in on the picture to get a closer look and noticed that the label had the word "genuine" misspelled as "geniune." I thought that surely they had caught this and it was an old image. Just in case, though, I passed this along to my project manager, who contacted the client.

They had not caught the error. In fact, all the labels on their soup were misspelled. That's a lot of labels to correct. It boggles my mind that something like that could go through so many people and never get caught. I got a hearty thanks from the client. It feels good to have caught something like that and to know I still got my proofreading chops. Of course, I bet I will have misspelled something in the post. I just know it...