Monday, May 03, 2010

What Happened To Quality?

I have a pair of GAP jeans that always give me problems. At first I thought one of my legs was shorter than the other or that my hips were canted at a slight angle since the bottom of one of the jean legs always dragged along the ground. It dragged enough to get caught on the bottom of my shoe when I walked. Then I got the brilliant idea to measure the legs of the jeans and found one (the one that dragged) was almost a half-inch longer that the other. No wonder I was always tripping. How can something like that happen?

The other day I was reading a book and reached the end of a page right in the middle of a sentence and when I turned to the next page I was looking at the start of a new chapter. Thinking I had accidentally turned two pages I scuffed the page in my hand with my fingers to see if it would separate into two pages but no, I only had one page. I checked the page numbers and, no, no pages missing. The only thing missing were the rest of the sentence and any words, sentences, or paragraphs right after that. How can something like that happen?

There is one news blog that I read online and I am appalled by the quality of the writing and lack of copy editing skills I find it it. It has a reporter's byline but I have a sneaking suspicion that an intern is writing it- and badly, I might add- without anyone checking it before it is publish. How can something like that happen?

And speaking of newspapers, I've also notice that some newspapers think that just because they have a Corrections section they really do not have to check their facts since they can just apologize for their errors the next day. How can something like that happen?

I could go on and on but I won't. I just ask, whatever happened to pride in workmanship?

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