Saturday, April 3, 2010

"The worst checking error is calling people dead who are not dead. . . . Sara remembers a reader in a nursing home who read in The New Yorker that he was 'the late' reader in the nursing home. He wrote demanding a correction. The New Yorker in its next issue, of course complied, inadvertently doubling the error, because the reader died over the weekend while the magazine was being printed." John McPhee, "Checkpoints," in Silk Parachute, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.

2 comments:

lrh said...

Something like that happened to David once when he was the ward clerk in Seattle. A couple in our ward got divorced. David put off filing the church paperwork on it. In a few months they remarried, but on the church books, they were already married. So he had to divorce them after they were remarried and then remarry them. If that makes sense.

lw said...

Too bad they couldn't have just let bygones be bygones, Church record-wise.