Last year, I spent a while down in Florida. Before I left, I submitted a change of address to my newspaper subscription.

The paper was supposed to start coming a few days after I went down, but it never came. Well, their Florida delivery service had been flakey in previous years, so I wasn’t too surprised (once they sent it to Cedar Falls, Iowa, for the first two weeks). I went to check my account and found that this time the mistake was mine: I’d filled out my new rental address as 132 Street instead of 123 Street. I changed the address to 123 and waited. 

And waited.

Another week. Still no paper. I’d been chatting online with customer service, and they had no idea why it wasn’t there. Reporting the paper as undelivered and getting a refund was becoming part of my morning routine.

One day, I was walking down the street, and what did I see in the driveway of 132? A familiar New York-based paper. Aha! 

I got on chat again and told them that I knew what was happening: somehow, my address was still listed wrong on their end (even though it was now correct on my account). Problem fixed?

No. No papers on my doorstep. Same familiar, blue-wrapped bundle at the neighbor’s. (I thought about just taking it home, but it could have been possible that [Neighbor] really did subscribe to The Times, and I was too shy to knock on a stranger’s door). 

More chats with customer service. More “I’m pretty sure I know what the problem is, you need to change the address”. More lack of newspaper.

After nearly a month of this, I finally talked to a representative over the phone. I repeated, for the umpteenth time, that they were sending the paper to the wrong address. I said that I thought it was possible that my updated address never made it to the local delivery service and begged them to check with the people on the ground and make sure they had the right information. The person on the phone told me, of course, right away, they were so sorry for my inconvenience.

The next day, my phone rang.

Woman: “Hi, I’m from [town paper delivery], and I wanted to talk to you about your reports of missing papers. Your address is 132 Street, correct?”

Me: “They said they were going to tell you! I just called them YESTERDAY, and they said they were going to give you the right address!”

I explained what had been going on.

Woman: *Sounding relieved.* “Oh, so that’s what it was. No one told us anything, just that we were being reported for failing to deliver the paper. We had our guy taking pictures of the paper on the driveway and everything, and they just kept telling us that we weren’t doing our job.”

I was absolutely outraged that HER team might have gotten in trouble for the COMPANY’S own screwup, and I told her so. In hindsight, maybe I should have called corporate and complained on their behalf, but I was so tired of the whole situation.

The paper started coming the next day. 

A funny postscript to the saga:

I was at my volunteer job at the local aquarium, and I was going to take an Uber home because my bike had a flat tire. One of the other docents heard that I lived on [Street], and he offered me a ride home. It turned out he lived on [Street], too.

The car pulled into the driveway at 132 Street.

Me: “YOU live here?”

Coworker: “Yes.”

Me: “This is going to sound like a strange question, but… back in the fall, was there a period of time when you were inexplicably getting a New York newspaper you weren’t subscribed to?”

Coworker: “Yes, actually, I was.”

Me: “Let me explain what was going on…”

Back when I was in school (over a decade ago now), we got a new chemistry teacher. She was in her first year of teaching, she was super nice, and we all adored her.

One time in class, she made a demonstration of a flour-dust explosion. The setup for this required her to blow into one end of a long tube to stir up the flour in the container at the other end in order for the small explosion to happen.

[Classmate], “works” (aka volunteers) for our pupils’ magazine.

Classmate: “Ms. [Teacher], is it okay for me to film the experiment?”

Teacher: “What are you going to use the video for?”

Classmate: “I thought it would be cool to show photos of the experiment in the pupils’ magazine.”

Teacher: “Oh, sure! That’s a great idea. I’d love to see the pictures when the next issue of the magazine is published.”

He proceeded to film the experiment, and one of the frames from the video did end up in the next issue of the pupils’ magazine. It showed [Teacher] still blowing into the tube while there was a fireball at the other end.

The flavor text read: “Ms. [Teacher], a fire-spitting dragon.”

She took it in good stride when [Classmate] showed her the article and claimed that was the coolest she was ever going to look.

The publication where I worked (around 2010 to 2015) put out an advertising-heavy special edition. Since we had to do our normal publication on top of this, and since the boss kept trying to cut hours and avoid overtime, he chose to hire an outside production freelancer to lay out the special section.

We sent the freelancer placeholder copy (lorem ipsum) and ads so he could mock up the layout. As approved ads and final copy came in, we’d send him the finished replacements to flow into the designated spaces.

The freelancer worked at home, but our boss kept in contact with him and assured us that everything was going fine in the special section.

Print day rolled around, and suddenly, nobody could contact the freelancer. He wasn’t responding to emails or answering his phone. The boss said everything was fine — that he’d seen the section, and it was perfect.

Two hours past our print deadline, my boss came in, tossed us a DVD with a wink, and said, “See? I told you everything would work out just fine.” The freelancer had dropped by and delivered our section, picked up his check, and left.

Well, we’d be a little late to the printer, but at least we had our section. We’d do some rapid corrections in InDesign and send it out ASAP. Let’s see what’s on the DVD…

Flattened, uneditable PDFs — essentially pictures of each page of the special section. And each page was a disaster.

The boss had sent the freelancer uncorrected copy to use as placeholder text, and that’s what was in the PDFs, complete with typos and notes to the editor, like “Daniel Defresne !!CHECK SPELLING!!”. One article was still completely in lorem ipsum.

Large sections of each page were left blank. The paper was full of outdated and expired placeholder ads.

Full-page color ads for serious advertisers (like, you know, Microsoft) consisted of a blank white page with “ad: microsoft” written in the middle.

We turned to the boss in amazement. This was a disaster. We couldn’t run this. We’d need to somehow create an entire new special section in the next thirty minutes, or else we’d—

That’s when my boss said he’d told the freelancer to send the files directly to the printer.

It was now 4:00 am, it was too late to stop printing, and pulling the special section meant we’d have to pull the normal publication, as well.

So, the special edition hit the streets in shamefully amateur disaster nightmare form, and we had to void $15,000 worth of advertising contracts.

I had a perfectly decent fellow for a boss some years ago who didn’t know the first thing about computers, which is too bad, seeing as he was a newspaper editor.

I was showing him how we could create spreadsheets to track results on election nights. To demonstrate, I created two pretend candidates and gave them fake numbers of votes. When the percentages appeared in the next set of cells, he stammered:

Boss: “You mean it does the math?”

He thought I was just arranging the numbers in pretty boxes.

This occurred quite some time ago, long before it was possible to easily screen calls coming to one’s landline, let alone to a not-yet-available cell phone.

Our area had a couple of major daily newspapers, along with a few highly local papers; it wasn’t unusual for a household to subscribe to both a major and a local paper. We subscribed to just the largest major daily.

Caller: “Hello, I’m calling to tell you about the many advantages of subscribing to [Local Newspaper we do not receive].”

The caller lists the local paper’s coverage.

Caller: “Would you be interested in subscribing?”

Me: “It sounds very interesting, but I’m illiterate.”

Caller: “…”

Me: “…”

Caller: “Um, er, well, I hope you have a good day!” *Hangs up rapidly*

That’s still the most effective sales-call-ender I’ve ever used!