If a cow ever got the chance...

This is going to sound like some sort of grandiose boast but it isn't: I am the greatest proofreader ever. Unfortunately. Even when I was little, I could find spelling mistakes in published books. They annoyed me then, too. Now, in my current incarnation as a production editor (meaning that I check the work of the freelance copyeditors and proofreaders), I have developed laser-eyes that can incinerate offending pages. Today I found like four errors in a book that is supposed to be printed next week, as I was checking it over. Stupid things, like misspelling Bhagavad Gita (it's a book about religion, too).

The laser eyes may also incinerate my career. Because everyone hates me for this ability. Hell, I hate myself for it. If I have to take a final glance at a set of galleys that is set to go to the printer that day, I'll find like six mistakes that the freelancers missed. Then typesetting has to fix them, which is lots of work for them, and our "plant costs" will go up, which will annoy my boss, and I will have to do more work, which annoys me, and it's not like I'm going to get any sort of little gold star or promotion for it.

You may have already thought of the very simple solution to all these problems: I DON'T FUCKING SAY ANYTHING about all these mistakes. No one would ever know. I would just report that the galleys look fine, the book would be printed, and no one would say anything unless some nutcase like me writes to the publisher someday. Life would be much more simple. I would be fulfilling my basic job requirements.

So why don't I just keep my mouth shut? I don't know. These basic dumb errors make the book look stupid and I hate that. It really, actively bothers me not to have them fixed. Not because it will devalue the product and reflect badly on my company, just because I hate to have the book be flawed when I know that I could have made it better. So I go in and show the boss, she looks at me like I'm crazy, and tells me to have them fixed. And they are.

Is this conscience, or is it OCD? I honestly don't know. I don't wash my hands for fifteen minutes every time I go to the bathroom. And I know, with total certainty, that my oven is off. But nevertheless, reading this over I'm getting worried about my mental state. It bothers me that these errors bother me so much. It seems entirely possible that I could end up like that old chick who got fired last year, whom everyone loathed because she kept pointing out the most inconsequential trivial inconsistences in our books, and who told me once that when she read anything for fun--fiction, how-to manuals, etc.--she would keep a red pencil at hand and mark all the errors in the margin. Not to send to the publisher or anything (and even that's a little odd, taking it upon yourself to write to a random publisher to point stuff out). Just because it made her feel better to do so. (I bet she was hell on library books.) That could totally be me in thirty years.

I think I need to get control of this.

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