I was a proper editor at my fourth newspaper. Not to say I was good at it, but I supervised a few people: A sports reporter (not really – he had it handled), a lady who wrote about the next town over and whoever was helping us enter copy that came in from the public into the computer.

I had gotten used to being chief cook and bottle washer at my previous paper, but I had my hands full with the front page at this operation, so I had to delegate.

One year we had a high school girl setting type for us.

She was cute, but something about the way she chewed her gum suggested a cow chewing its cuud. She also had a real habit of not following directions.

Back then, if you used the caps lock in MS Word, there was no way to de-capitalize it. Most people in town didn’t have computers, especially the ladies in garden club and the geneology society, so press releases tended to be pretty rough copy.

If an event was important enough, I’d edit the release to read like an actual article. But most realeases were just glorified calendar entries, so as long as folks wrote in complete sentences, we ran them as is.

Small town folks were insecure about what words to capitalize and when, so a lot of times they’d type it in all-caps so nobody would judge. I didn’t. I knew not everybody had gone to college like I did.

Several press days in a row, I’d be on deadline and find the teenager had typed several releases EXACTLY as is, using all-caps just like the old lady who wrote it. I couldn’t fix it in Word, so I had to find retype everything myself when I was still dealing with front page layout. Grrr!

She did turned in copy like that one time too many and I kinda snapped at her. “I’ve told you a million times, don’t do that. No matter what they turn in, DO NOT type in all-caps! Do you understand?”

“Yes sir.” And it finally sank in. I quit having to retype press releases.

So one day I had a little free time and decided to help typeset, since people had turned in a lot of copy that week. High school girl acted like she wanted to get my attention, but wouldn’t say anything.

Finally I asked her what was wrong. She said, “Umm, Mr. LateBloomer, you said not to type in all-caps, but is it OK if I type this in all-caps?” It was an acronym.

Where to even begin? I said, “OK, if if’s an acronym or an abbreviation, you now have my permission to type it in all caps.” I really hope she graduated from high school.