Typo Hunt Across America

Somerville, MA

Today Boston decided to take a hesitant nip of the great intoxicating dew of spring, with temperatures hovering around the mid-forties. The sun was bright in a clear sky. I ventured down the red line on the T and into the western warren of green line branches for a doctor’s appointment in the afternoon. Specifically I was going to pay forty dollars to have a man jam a slender tube down my nostril and into my throat. Such are the joys of having a budget genero-plan, one of the cheaper options among the gallery of extortion that Massachusetts presented me with once I left my job at MIT. As of recently, the state began to require all its residents to have some kind of health insurance or else face financial penalties, loss of tax exemption status, mutilation from barbed weapons, etc. I got taken in by a plan that looked relatively affordable on the surface but has slammed me repeatedly with outrageous copays.

I arrived at the facility and went through the first round of check-in. As the bearded, earringed young man behind the counter leafed through my wallet, I spied a stack of business cards to my left and picked one up. And oh, I was filled with a kind of world-muting dread.

“Excuse me,” I said to the young man, “there’s a typo on these cards.”

He examined the card I handed him. “Oh, I never noticed that.” He did sound genuinely embarrassed on behalf of Brighton Marine Medical Center.

“I suppose this will never be fixed,” I said.

“No,” he said, shaking his head, “there must be thousands of these cards.”

I was struck by melancholy at the thought of the error propagated so many times already, and probably slated to do so again with the next printing run. What could one man do about such a large-scale fuckup? The answer, I decided, was probably nothing.

After my appointment, which featured an extended manhandling of my face so that the doctor could point out my nodes to a fresh-faced blonde resident named Becky, I stepped out once again into the actually pleasant Boston afternoon and determined to scout out some typos downtown in the iconic Copley Square. I boarded an ancient green line trolley among a gabby passel of high-schoolers and soon arrived at my destination, beneath the glimmering phallus of Hancock Tower. I wandered along Boylston Avenue until I came to a Filene’s Basement in the loathsomely named Newb’ry complex, and I knew that to find and correct a choice error here would be to apply balm to the very soul of Boston.

Filene’s has been a name long associated with Boston, through the department store of that name and the separately owned Filene’s Basement properties, which started in the space beneath the original department store in Downtown Crossing. I was doing a temporary assignment at the corporate offices of Filene’s during its final days before being swallowed up and obliterated by Macy’s, scanning document after document into their systems for months. Down below, Filene’s Basement hastened to assure its customers that while Filene’s was going the way of the buffalo, that Basement would remain open for business. Less than two years later they shuttered as well, leaving the whole of the massive building from roof to cellar an empty shell haunted by the spirits of the unemployed. However, by that time the “Newb’ry” location was open, and so Filene’s Basement retains a presence in Boston… at least for now.

There on Boylston, the Basement is no basement at all, but a ground-level facility that dares even to have a second floor. I prowled its aisles in search of typos, for a good while missing the very obvious one hanging above my head for all the congregation of shoppers to see. Click to enlarge.

In the picture it’s a bit too small to see, but the “boxed ties” sign provides an even grosser perversion of Men’s than the hanging sign: “MENS’ BOXED TIES.” Regardless, I was transfixed by that institutionalized error floating above my head, flaring in red. And here, reader, is where I am ashamed to go further, but I must in good journalistic faith: I did nothing about the typo.

Did I alert the manager of Filene’s Basement to this vile and permanent mistake that had daily been sullying his store’s reputation for who knew how long, perhaps since the place had opened? No, I did not. Did I mention to a sales clerk the presence of the error, in the hopes that a momentary adventure up a sturdy ladder could both right what was wrong and perhaps make said clerk a hero before his or her fellows? I did not, reader, and I suspected afterward that I was possessed of the rankest cowardice… a failing that could have actually been at work earlier in the day, too, in the affair of the thousands of business cards. Had I then, either, made any effort to appeal to upper management for rectification? No, I had contented myself with an offhand remark to a person of doubtless little influence in the sphere of card-printing.

O readers, I am afraid that I must get over this inhibition, for the world’s sake and yours. I know that cowardice may be very well be an operating principle for this mission, though. Already I know that I will probably shy from attempting to correct errors in places that I am eating or sleeping, or at least until after the vital service has been transacted. Vulgar truthsayers may point to a certain expression about not releasing foeces in the same venue you partake of nourishment. So, too, was cowardice firmly at the controls when I peeled all of the yowling bleeding-heart political bumper stickers off Callie, my car (with the exception of the Howard Dean specimen, which proved as tenacious as Governor Dean himself and which I was forced to paper over with Beck-themed stickers). I kept thinking about my impending passage through firm red-state demesnes and the rancor that the stickers might provoke, a rancor that might only be assuaged by forcefully applying blunt objects to my windows.

I will do my best from here on, though, to pursue the actual eradication of typos with the fervor that TEAL’s mission statement demands. You should expect no less from a bearer of our vaunted standard.

Totals
Typos Found: 3
Typos Corrected: 1

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 11:17 pm and is filed under Massachusetts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.