Tacos and Typos
Or, my critical eye never goes on vacation
My dear sweet husband can’t catch a break. It’s not his fault. One time, he spent the whole day painstakingly plastering tile to our kitchen backsplash. He brought me in at the end of the day to show me, and I immediately—and I’m talking immediately—spotted the single section where the placement of one tile didn’t precisely match up with its neighbor’s.
He’s learned that my inevitable laser-focusing, pointing, and asking “What’s that?” isn’t meant as a criticism or disregard of his hard work. It’s just how I’m built.
I have a critical eye. My eye will see, in record time, the things that don’t match, go better somewhere else, or are just plain wrong.
It makes me really good at jigsaw puzzles. I’m undefeated at escape rooms. I’ve even made a career out of it. I’ve made it into my superpower.
But every superpower comes at a price.
In my case, it’s that I can’t turn it off, even when I’m on vacation. I can turn off my phone, my laptop, the TV … but the thing about being a human on this planet is that it’s rare to go anywhere and not need to read at some point. Airport directionals, tour brochures, museum signage. Words are omnipresent.
Which means that typos are, too.
I see typos everywhere. And it’s not just misspellings. Grammatical errors grate1 on my nerves. Certain fonts give me the heebie-jeebies.
I’ve never had any formal training; I learned more grammar rules in Spanish class than I ever did in English. Throughout my career, surrounded by colleagues with actual certificates and degrees in this stuff, I’ve lovingly referred to my skills as my “street smarts.”
I don’t know the formal terminology for proper sentence structure, I’ve never been able to keep straight the objects and subjects of sentences … my brain just recognizes that words—and the sentences and paragraphs they form—are just supposed to look and feel a certain way.
And when they don’t, I feel it in my body. A tiny twinge in my brain. An involuntary reaching out of my hand to FIX. To make the world right again.
I couldn’t even escape them in Mexico. Surrounded by aquamarine waters, salt-and-chlorine-scented breezes, and UV radiation that no amount of sunscreen could hinder, the typos still found me.
They found me before we even arrived.
The resort concierge sent me a spreadsheet form of items we could order ahead of time to have our room pre-stocked with pantry essentials. I saw so many typos, errors, and mistranslations that, when I replied with our order, I also attached an edited version of the form. “I hope this isn’t too forward of me…” I told the concierge in my email. She accepted it with the grace of someone well-trained in hospitality management. I breathed a sigh of relief and got back to packing my suitcase.
Over the course of the week we were there, I catalogued some of the typos I encountered. Here’s a selection. I’ve underlined the errors in hot pink, which is friendlier than red, to show that I mean well. Does it come across?
I thought about offering my writing and editing services to the resort—perhaps it could end up being a revenue stream for me. But in the end, I didn’t. I didn’t want to insult them. Maybe they’re well aware of the typos, but can’t get corporate to see the value in updated signage. Maybe there’s a severe nepotism epidemic at the resort and it’s being run by incompetent, inexperienced, entitled pricks.
Or maybe they DGAF because when you’re at an oceanside resort in Mexico, you’re not supposed to find typos, you’re supposed to relax.
Fine.
Not wanting my vacation to result in my proclaiming a clichéd “I need a vacation from my vacation” upon my return to Maryland, I resigned myself to the grammatical madness and tried to focus on reading the books I’d brought with me; the things I’d actually intended to read.
I ended up devouring seven books on that trip. I don’t recall seeing a typo in a single one.
I also met an iguana that simultaneously fascinated and terrified me.
Here’s to relaxing.
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I considered writing this as “great,” but just the thought of it made me cringe.
I nodded the whole time I read this. I actually did have formal education in such things, but it complemented (I had to type this twice due to autocorrect) my innate “knowing.”