So I finally got my Curios and Relics FFL from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives, and Weed. (Just kidding on that last part.) Anyway, along with this license they send you a packet of useful information, including a chart to help identify anyone who steals a firearm from you.
It’s a handy dandy diagram of a man - half of his body is wearing a T-shirt and pants, the other, an overcoat and a hat. Here - I scanned it for you. There are little lines pointing to all of the different features or characteristics that a person’s appearance might have.
Such as:
Sex
Race
Age
Weight
Height
Wepon type
That’s right. Wepon type. WEPON TYPE!
This is from people whose only job it is, is to work for a government agency that handles the transfer of weapons. Day in and day out, they file papers and sign forms and deal with countless other things that have the word “weapon” all over it! And yet they can’t even SPELL THE FUCKING WORD RIGHT?!?!
And not only did they make the mistake, but not a single person working there caught it?
Hey, ATF. I’ve got a great idea. Let me be your editor! Obviously you need one. Just give me all of your paperwork, and I’ll proof read it, and you won’t have any more errors, and people won’t think you’re morons. All I ask is that you give me a machine gun, and make whoever is your hottest secretary suck my dick once a day. That’s all. I’m faxing over my resume right now. Come on, you won’t find a better editor in the whole United States, I promise.
One thing you learn after you’ve been a editor for a certain period of time is not to get too high and mighty about typos, no matter how egregious. They happen to the best of us. You can think you’ve slaved over a piece getting it 100% correct, and then when it comes back from the printer there’s a big fat goof on the cover, or on the first page you open it to.
Ain’t that the truth. My dad was a math textbook editor, and a middle school math book made it through four careful copy editings before someone finally realized that in one problem, they had the union of sets F and K in a problem. Or, for the math-challenged amongst us, F U K.
I do math books too, and I had one similar to that once (though I caught it while editing, and I only flagged it for the authors to fix because it wasn’t quite as egregious)—the probability of an item being in the union of set H and set K:
It wouldn’t be worth it. I write safety basis documents for a plutonium facility. Just a single one, not everything overlooked by the DOE, just a single one. We have a document due soon, our annual submittal, that fills** 40** D-ring binders. Trust me man, a machine gun with unlimited free rounds plus a blond, brunette (one each Caucasian, Latina, and Asian), and redhead secretary giving bjs every day wouldn’t make it worth it. Technical editing sucks.
