On the road to a bad day

I had my morning rest shattered last Sunday when I was awakened by a text message from an alert reader who wanted me to know about a mistake on that day’s front page.

“Today’s headline should read ‘U.S. 93,’ not ‘2.’”

Just as people do when they get bad news about the death of a loved one, I rapidly went through the stages of grief, starting with “denial.”

That can’t possibly be. What is he talking about? U.S. 93 goes north and south. U.S. 2 goes east and west. They are not same road. They are not interchangeable. Anyone knows that. What kind of an idiot could possibly make that kind of mistake??? ... ON THE FRONT PAGE!

Well, the truth is it was THIS kind of an idiot — yours truly.

So I thought I had better come clean with you, the readers, so that the shame of making a front-page error above the fold in a four-deck headline could be properly assigned to me. No reason why anyone else who works at the Inter Lake should take the heat.

I actually was pretty proud of that headline when I wrote it because I had to think of a way to write about the “courthouse couplet” without using the word “courthouse” since it was too long to fit in the space available. I came up with “U.S. 2/may lose/famed/Kalispell/couplet.” The paper went to bed a few hours later, and so did I, sleeping happily until that rude awakening described above.

What makes it particularly aggravating is that, as most of you know, I have lived here for 30 years. I’ve driven around the county courthouse on the couplet that splits around the courthouse on U.S. 93 probably a minimum of 2,000 times. I even have a funny story about driving back from a concert at the Gorge in George, Washington, in the middle of the night and shouting at my friend who was driving to VEER LEFT at the couplet, thus sending us around the courthouse the wrong way on a one-way street! (OK, so I have a problem with right and left, too!)

So, the bottom line is, I know what U.S. 93 is, but I also know what a mistake is — and I made a doozy. 

Reminds me that one of the questions we often ask prospective employees is, “What is the worst mistake you have ever made as a reporter or editor — and how did you handle it?”

If people say they have never made a bad mistake, you pretty much know that the worst mistake they made was lying to you about being perfect. But that doesn’t happen often. Usually, people have to think for more than a few seconds, maybe as long as a minute, but then they have that “aha!” moment and tell you about spelling the mayor’s name wrong, or attributing a quote to the wrong source, or embarrassing a reader by including a detail that was shared in confidence. 

Mistakes? There are a million of them. And when you are employed at a newspaper where your work is sent to thousands of readers’ homes every day, immortalized on the Internet and enshrined as part of history, every mistake you make is like a dagger to your heart. 

My sincere apology to each and every one of you, and I promise I am on my guard to make sure this mistake doesn’t happen again. 

Now, if I could just figure out what else is likely to go wrong and catch it before any of you see it in print! That would help me sleep better, a lot better, but frankly, it’s not likely to happen. If you’ve ever had a problem with that “right and left” thing, you probably know what I am talking about.