3am Today

I often start my writings with a look of question, similar to the picture above as if to say “this can’t be right.” Sometimes, it’s just in amusement and other times, I am completely dumbfounded by what I am about to write about.

This is a post about a young 20’s something woman, who by the way is a writer. As always, one can assume that obtaining the title of writer would mean to suggest that someone has some formal education to include not only the concepts of writing, but spelling would come to mind as a necessity in order to be able to fulfill the role of a writer.

In an office space near a client, a young woman was meeting with her boss.

The boss – also a woman – was giving her feedback and reviewing edits she had made on something this young woman wrote.

That particular edit was correcting the spelling of “hampster” to “hamster”. Apparently she had used the phrase “like spinning in a hamster wheel” in this draft, speech or or op-ed.

The young woman kept saying, “I don’t know why you corrected that because I spell it with the P in it.” The boss said calmly, “But that’s not how the word is spelled. There is no P in hamster.”

The young woman exclaimed “But you don’t know that! I learned to spell it with a P in it so that’s how I spell it.” The boss remaining very calm and professional, let’s go to http://dictionary.com and look it up together.

The young woman insists she doesn’t need to look it up because it’s fine to spell it with a P because that’s how she wanted to spell it.

The boss who I am sure at this point in time has informed herself that today would be a good day to start drinking says, “I know edits can be difficult to go over sometimes, especially when you’re working on new kinds of things as you grow in your career, but it’s a necessary process and makes us all better at what we do.”

After the boss had got up from table and gone to her office, the young woman can barely hold it together. She moves to another table in the common workspace area, drops all her stuff loudly on the table top, and starts texting. A minute later, her phone rings.

It was her mom. She had text her mom to call her because it was urgent, and I’m sure her mother maybe thought she was in the ER or something. She then puts her mom on speakerphone in a common area of the workplace.

The young woman bursts into tears and wants her mom to call her boss and tell her not to be mean about telling her how to spell words like “hamster”.

The mother tells the young woman that her boss is an idiot and she doesn’t have to listen to her and she should go to the boss’ boss to file a complaint about not allowing creativity in her writing.

The young woman kept saying, “I thought what I wrote was perfect and she just made all these changes and then had the nerve to tell me I was spelling words wrong when I know they are right because that is how I have always spelled them.”