the mayor of fun

Back when I worked in the nightmarish world of quick printing, I did typesetting and layouts for a lot of newsletters, which were counted among my least favorite jobs. Some were worse than others, but none was worse than a particular newsletter for the community association of one of the area’s smaller, quaint beach towns.

As you can imagine, the leaders of a community association in a quaint beach town are very nice, well-meaning retirees who have time to do things like write community newsletter articles. What they apparently didn’t have time to do was figure out to use email or save their files to disk.

Every month, the president of the association and the newsletter “editor” would show up at my office with a stack of printed articles that the various contributors had written, and they would tell me how they wanted it to look. I could tell just by looking at their printed articles, all of which were typed in Arial or Times New Roman, that they had certainly been created on computers. If it’s already on a computer somewhere in the world, there’s no reason I should have to type it, too.

Then I would ask, “Instead of having me spend a lot of time retyping all of these articles, which is going to cost you more money, is there any way I can have them on disk?”

“Well, we have a lot of people submitting these articles. It would be hard to get it all on one disk.”

“Multiple disks would be fine,” I’d reply. “I’m just trying to save you guys some money, plus the headache of having to proofread it all after I’ve retyped it. Not to mention the fact that you’ll get your job more quickly.”

The conversation would always end with them saying that they’d try to do it my way the next month, but when the next month arrived they’d be right back in my office with a stack of printed articles for me to retype.

Then finally, a new association president was elected. I had the same conversation with him the first time he brought the newsletter to me, and he said that he would be happy to provide the text on disk. He told me he would type it up himself and bring me a disk, which I thought sounded a bit odd. Haven’t they already been typed?

The next day, he showed up with a 3.5” floppy disk and left. I put it in the computer and there were all the articles. I was overjoyed. Until I opened one of them. IT WAS IN ALL CAPS. EVERY SINGLE ARTICLE WAS IN ALL CAPS. HE MUST HAVE STAYED UP LATE RETYPING EVERY ARTICLE IN ALL CAPS. WHY WOULD HE DO SUCH A THING WHEN HE COULD’VE JUST COLLECTED THE ORIGINAL ARTICLES ON DISKS? I guess he was too busy doing awesome retiree stuff to be bothered with using his shift key and typing like a normal person.

“Shit,” I thought. “I guess that’s how he wants it. All caps type takes up a lot more space than regular type. I hope you guys like Garamond Condensed.” I finished the first proof in record time and they came back to look at it, and I bet you can guess the first thing they said:

“Why is everything in all caps?”

“Because you submitted your text in all caps.”

“Well yes, but we don’t want it to actually look like that.”

At the time, I had no way to convert all caps to normally-formatted text. So there I sat, with all the articles right there on disk, and I retyped every one. And I continued to type every article in their newsletter for another year, until another president was elected. He decided to use a different print company and I never saw the computer marvels of the community association ever again.