Slowly I Turn Step by Step

        While writing up these memory-a-day entries, I find myself typing the word Niagara once in a while, and every time I do, I cringe a little with a certain memory. And I guess I’ll ‘fess up to it in this post.

        The summer after my freshman year in college my Dad got me some work in the office at the welding supply business where he was a salesman. I did odd jobs around the office. One of my bigger projects was to punch out the addresses of all the clients that the business had onto metal plates. This was before word processors and computers, 1972. I can’t remember now what the address plates were used for. Maybe they were for stamping onto envelopes? I used an instrument that punched letters and punctuation into metal.

        Since I remember so little about it, perhaps I shouldn’t even be talking about it, except for this one thing.

        I had the whole client list, and I began punching away. There were a lot of addresses with Niagara Falls as the city. And there were more than a few companies with Niagara in the name. Buffalo is about 20 miles from the American Niagara Falls, and just a few more from the Canadian Niagara Falls, so it was not unusual to find a few companies from either Falls to be clients of a welding supply business in Buffalo.

        I punched away at the addresses.

        My mind wandered.

        I punched in the word Niagara, and my mind got to thinking about Niagara and how some people might not spell it right. Good thing it was me there punching in those addresses. I always prided myself on spelling correctly. I knew how to spell Niagara. There would be a lot of bad metal addresses if someone else were doing this and did not know how to spell Niagara.

        What I remember most about this job and the address punching project was that I was positive I knew how to spell Niagara correctly.

        Except that I am positive that every single instance of the word Niagara on those plates is spelled Niagra.

        That was how I thought it was spelled!

        Thank goodness these days there is the Internet to save me! When I’m typing and I have the least little wonder about the spelling of something, I remember Niagra and then I google the word so it is spelled correctly in my writing.

        I can’t imagine what the rest of the office thought when I finished for the summer and they discovered the misspelling on a goodly number of their address plates. I don’t think they mentioned it to Dad – it would have mortified him – and I would have heard about it. No doubt, Dad’s co-workers probably concluded since I was by then in my sophomore year of college, that there was a bunch of money going down the drain!

        Total screw-up, or as I have been heard to say from time to time – not the brightest bulb in the tulip patch – and in this instance, even that is a gross understatement!

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