Proofreading at 6 am
Part 2 of my earlier post, ‘Everyone has to start somewhere’, where I enter the world of the written word, learn valuable skills and emigrate to Australia.
Tempe, Arizona, 1979. I’m finishing my last university credits and will finally graduate after six years. I apply for a job as a proofreader. I’m 22 and pretty sure I’ve been born to proofread. After all, hadn’t I won a spelling bee as a 10-year-old in 5th grade?
No one gets through an arts degree without churning out a ream or two of paper in essays, assignments, reports and term papers. Editing and proofing one’s own work was routine for undergraduates. I had done my share of proofreading. But I had never worked at a desk job and was soon to learn that the world of proofreading for a publishing company was about a whole lot more than just spelling.
The publishing company I worked for had four proofreaders. We clocked in at 6 am, Monday through Friday. We were offered Saturday morning works if the team was behind on a deadline.
It was not uncommon in the hot desert climate of Arizona to start work early in the morning and finish before the hottest part of the day. The early start didn’t worry me much, as I had worked breakfast shifts at an on-campus dining hall for the previous three years.
The proofing room held four long tables that faced forward, and we sat one person at a table. The walls displayed large posters of the proofreader’s marks we were to use on the copy. To the uninitiated, proofreading and editing markup is a complex language of symbols, that looks like hieroglyphics drawn by a young child.
After an induction and training session on the first morning, any new proofreaders buddied up with an experienced person in the afternoon. After that, we met individually, from time to time, with a team leader to learn where our weaknesses lie. We had a style guide, which we called a ‘cheat sheet’, at each table for layout rules, terms, abbreviations and other things specific to work in progress.
Copy editors worked in another room and marked up a white printout with blue pencil. Their copy went back to the typesetting editors who made the corrections on a Wang Word Processing terminal. These Wang machines were magical to me. I had typed all my university term papers on a borrowed manual typewriter or one of the university library’s electric machines.
Every few days, the team leader delivered two thick stacks of wide, Z-fold, continuous pages to each of us. Proofreaders worked with the new pink copy that had printed overnight to check line-by-line against the copy editing team’s blue pencil edits on a white printout. When we found a modification that the copy editor had missed, we applied the correct marks with our red pen on the pink copy. The room was silent apart from the rustle of pages and the scrape of four red pens. That was just our first pass of a page. Next, we re-read the page for any other errors in formatting, spelling or grammar that the copy editors may have missed. Then we moved to the next page, and the next and the next.
The room was silent apart from the rustle of pages and the scrape of four red pens.
This job was so different from all of the on-campus kitchen jobs I had previously done. In those jobs, I was on my feet the entire shift taking food deliveries at the loading bay, unloading stock into fridges and freezers, rushing from the prep kitchen out into the dining hall to replenish the massive salad bar for hungry students in a residence hall.
Changes to the copy editors’ work were rare. It was easy to drift off, leaving a small trail of telltale red ink dots in the margin of the printout…
The real magic of this job was learning from the people in a third room, the editors room, about how they moved text about the page and created Bold and Italic text on Wang Word Processors. I had heard of these machines from my dad, who worked on contracts with the US Space program.
One editor I’d become lunchroom buddies with agreed to show me the basics of ‘The Wang’ on Saturday shifts when fewer people were around. These machines fascinated me.
The Wang had already been through iterations and improvements, inside and out, over the previous decade. The machine we worked on had a blinking monitor with a curved front that dropped down to a keyboard and some slots for removable floppy disks. You could save your information; this was groundbreaking to me. I started reading up at the university library and discovered the terms Data Storage and Information Management. Before 1979 didn’t know what those words meant. But I wanted to learn more.
But other life plans got in the way. My strongest desire was to travel overseas and meet my grandparent’s families in the UK and Italy. Reading Kerouac, Twain and Mitchener had awakened the gypsy in me, and it would be a couple more years before I could pick up where I had left off.
I’d managed to save enough money to head to London in September of that year with a Eurail Pass. After a year in Europe, where I’d met an endless stream of Australian backpackers, I found myself in sparkling Sydney, Australia, in 1981.
Along with my travelling companion Peg, we hitched our way around the country, picking up rides with truck drivers from depot to depot. We found work at a sheep station in the Pilbara region of Western Australia (another whole story).
Eventually, I made my way to New Zealand, Rarotonga (Cook Islands) and Tahiti. After 18 months of travelling and working to earn enough for a few more months of travel, I finally ran out of money. It was time to go back to the USA.
After a stint of waitressing, I landed a job as a research assistant and later became a business analyst. During my time in these roles, I learned to write and edit proposals under the guidance of a Technical Writer named Syl. We became friends.
Syl encouraged me to put my hand up for any writing work to attain the skills to be a Technical Writer. I did, and I was rewarded with access to the Wang Word Processor and eventually an IBM PC that appeared in the office.
But my heart was aching to return to Australia. Determined to go back, I contacted the Australian Embassy to suss out what my options were. I discovered that ‘Business Analyst’ was on the list of skilled migrant jobs in demand. But, because I didn’t have 5+ years of experience doing the job, I would have to find an employment sponsor.
So, it was back to Australia to look for job sponsorship.
Within days, a friend in Sydney told me about a company that needed an editor for a proposal response, and all the better if the editor could work with a Wang Word Processor. I jumped at the opportunity and hoped to remember what I had learned in those long-ago sessions in Tempe, Arizona. The old Wang technology that I knew was about to be superseded by PCs in Australia. But, luckily for me, this company had not caught up.
The proposal won the work. The company offered me a project role. Within three months, they also offered to sponsor me for permanent residence.
When the company took me on as a permanent member of staff, I chose a title that I was proud to own for many years,that of Technical Writer. And I have Syl to thank.
If you enjoyed this essay you may like to read the first part here.