From a blog post by Edmonton Journal columnist Todd Babiak:
I have written for the Journal since 2001. In that time, I have only caused three “corrections” — the dreaded sentence on the second page of the newspaper that describes an error on the part of the writer. Three times too many.
Steve Glassman, executive producer at CBC, is someone I see a lot. We talk. We joke. We know each other quite well. So why, in my Tuesday column, did I call him “Steve Blackman”?
I knew a Steve Blackman once, and apparently my brain wasn’t working properly in Banff — where I wrote the column. Maybe it was the thin air.
Nothing is more humiliating, more depressing, more soul-destroying.
Steve saw me on Tuesday, extended his hand, and said. “Hi, I’m Steve Glassman.”
At that moment, I knew precisely what I had done. I wanted to crawl under the table, in the Delegates’ Lounge at the Banff World Television Festival, and weep. Of course, this is an entirely selfish reaction. MY NAME was spelled correctly. He’s the one whose family and friends had to endure a misspelling. Perhaps Steve is now wandering around Banff, worried about his identity. Who am I? Who AM I?
I apologized to Steve, endlessly, and phoned my crackerjack editor, Keri Sweetman. She wrote the correction. Yet apologies are never enough. What IS enough? Three hundred percent more self-loathing, with extra not-sleeping, leading to a long bout of influenza, is a start…
Thanks, Chris and M!
