Here’s one way never
to say “my mistake”
“I’m not wrong I’m not I’m not I’m not.” Back when I worked on the client side, I sent a rough layout of a brochure to one of our product managers. She called in a fury. “What is this? What are all these lines? What’s all this sketching?”
This was before desktop publishing. You made rough layouts by sketching photos, hand-lettering headlines, and drawing horizontal lines to represent body copy. You submitted actual copy on a separate, typewritten sheet. The idea was to make changes before incurring the expenses of taking photos, setting type, and pasting everything onto an art board.
Clearly, this was her first rodeo, so I wasn’t even tempted to adopt a you’re-an-idiot tone. I simply explained that this was the industry standard and why.
Embarrassed at her naïveté—she needn’t have been—she apologized for having screamed at me. Ha ha, just kidding. With enough frigidity to leave a layer of frost on my phone’s handset, she said, “It’s not very professional.”
She went on to a great career.
This was before desktop publishing. You made rough layouts by sketching photos, hand-lettering headlines, and drawing horizontal lines to represent body copy. You submitted actual copy on a separate, typewritten sheet. The idea was to make changes before incurring the expenses of taking photos, setting type, and pasting everything onto an art board.
Clearly, this was her first rodeo, so I wasn’t even tempted to adopt a you’re-an-idiot tone. I simply explained that this was the industry standard and why.
Embarrassed at her naïveté—she needn’t have been—she apologized for having screamed at me. Ha ha, just kidding. With enough frigidity to leave a layer of frost on my phone’s handset, she said, “It’s not very professional.”
She went on to a great career.
—Steve Cuno
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