[Ed. note: just a quick reminder that in my day job, I’m a proofreader with a large corporation that is peripherally attached to the IT industry…]
Just between you and me, it’s not easy picking nits for a living.
It is my experience that proofreaders are the least appreciated, most invisible member of the production team, at least until something goes wrong, whereupon everyone suddenly declares us the linch pin that holds everything together and decides we’re the single point of failure in any catastrophe scenario (i.e., we’re the ones who get our butts kicked if an error slips through the net and ends up getting published). While I’ve avoided any error-derived butt-kicking lately, it nevertheless seems like I’ve been fighting a lot of battles over minutiae that I myself wouldn’t have noticed or cared about a year ago, and it’s getting tiresome. It probably doesn’t help that I seem to be losing as many of those battles as I win, and that the losses are almost always due to simple obstinance on the part of someone above me in the chain of command. The Great Hyphenation Confrontation of Tuesday Last, for instance, ended with me being told that I was absolutely correct about how a particular item should or should not be hyphenated… and it didn’t matter because the client wanted to do it the other way, so that’s how it was going to be done. I stewed about this ignominious defeat for hours, greatly aggravated that I had no recourse and that my input wasn’t respected or even wanted by the bozo client, but also because I couldn’t believe I was so upset over a freaking hyphen. The whole incident frankly left me wondering why I even bother going into the office in the morning.
It was therefore quite gratifying to run across some affirmation that, yes, sometimes silly little things like punctuation marks are important after all:
A grammatical blunder may force Rogers Communications Inc. [of Canada] to pay an extra $2.13-million… after the placement of a comma in a contract permitted [a] deal’s cancellation.
…Page 7 of the contract states: The agreement “shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.”
Rogers’ intent in 2002 was to lock into a long-term deal of at least five years. But when regulators with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) parsed the wording, they reached another conclusion.
The validity of the contract and the millions of dollars at stake all came down to one point — the second comma in the sentence.
Had it not been there, the right to cancel [the contract] wouldn’t have applied to the first five years of the contract and Rogers would be protected from the higher rates it now faces.
I wonder if someone in the Rogers organization told a proofreader along the way that his objections are comma-placement were duly noted, but they were going ahead anyway?
