Unlike many of our peers, my husband and I still have a landline. We have had our phone number since we bought our house in 2011 and, apparently, our number is currently on display as the number for the manager of an apartment building in town. What this means is that every few days around the middle of the month when people are looking to move into a new apartment, we get a phone call.
We are used to these phone calls by now and when we see a number on the call display that we don't recognize, we know what's coming.
Me: "Hello?"
Potential renter: "Hi there! I'm looking to rent one of your apartments and I was wondering if I can look at one of the suites."
Me: "I'm sorry but this is a private residence. The apartment building has posted the wrong number."
Potential renter: "What?"
Me: "The number they have posted is wrong."
Potential renter: "Do you have the right number?"
Me: "No."
Potential renter: "Okay, bye."
These exchanges are usually variations on the above theme but we do get the occasional potential renter that argues with us and demands to rent an apartment and insists that we must be wrong: "This is the number that's written on the sign!"
Every two calls, I ask the person to tell the manager to change the sign to remove our number but so far that hasn't happened. Probably we've had no luck with that because the people can't actually rent the apartment. This scenario is an important reminder for business owners to carefully edit their signage.
Since we've moved back to the North, I've seen many examples of people forgetting to edit in very public ways. Marquees happily announcing the "aniversery" of a store, misuse "they're, there, their", and, my favourite, is the 'git er done!' on the back window of a suped-up truck with single quotations around the ridiculous quote. Why the single quotation mark? If you feel like you need quotations around your dumb redneck statement, please take the time to find out which quotation mark you should use.
Otherwise, you are a driving advertisement for grammar errors and every time I see it, I want to ram my minivan into the bumper of your big truck yelling: "Proofread!"
But I digress. The importance of proofreading and editing semi-permanent public statements should be obvious but it's not. It should be particularly obvious for those who choose to adorn their bodies with tattoos but there is a person that I know who has, in very large letters, tattooed the name of a loved one on his back. Her name is spelled wrong. I urge everyone to have someone else take a quick peek at a proof before it goes in ink on your body or on a sign advertising suites to rent.
You are more likely to actually rent a suite and less likely to get ridiculed behind your back.
