When I’m not writing, I’m a consultant. People pay me to either have or find the answers to their computer matters. When I was teaching software applications, operating systems, development, whatever, I could walk around a classroom of 20 students and from roughly five feet away from a monitor tell a student if they were missing a comma, a semi-colon or period in their programming code.

As a writer, I seldom use spell check because I’m a pretty good speller and typos literally jump off a page at me. I was an English major in college and grammar finally made sense to me after three years of studying Latin grammar in high school.

The work I do has to be enjoyable to me or else why would I do it, so yesterday I found a job on a job board in a neighboring town for a company that I’d consulted for twice before. I like working locally or remotely but this was going to be a difficult sell to the recruiter because the job was for proofreading, something I haven’t done since college and have no experience for it listed on my resume. But I thought it might be fun to try again.

After toying with my resume and deciding there was no way I could tweak it enough to show proofreading experience, I determined that the cover letter was the best place to connect the dots between proofreading, my Bachelors in English and the writing I’ve previously done. I pointed to my writing samples on this blog and hoped that my attention to detail would be sufficient to get me in the door.

As I was proofing the cover letter in my e-mail, the phone rang, as it often does, and I thought, let me save this as a draft and I’ll finish it later.

When my call was finished and I couldn’t find my e-mail in my Drafts folder, I checked my Sent folder. There it was and guess what?

No, really, guess.  Give up?  TYPOS! Two of them! A proofreader who had a spelling error – and also spelled the recruiter’s name wrong!

Well, at least I caught it in t … oh, right.

Let this be a lesson to you boys and girls.  (By the way, I spell checked this.)

I’m just sayin’.