Editorial, November 1996

Erin meets the blues and wonders what the heck is going on

By Brian Alm, Editor

Our new editorial assistant, Erin Blagsvedt, was on board for three weeks when suddenly things went nuts. People were dashing around, glancing at the clock, shoving aside Erin's questions with a curt, "Not now. I'll talk to you later." Shortly before 5, Erin came into my office kind of bewildered and wondered what the heck was going on. "Why was everybody so tense today?"
"Oh, it was just the blues," I said. "Today was the blues." Erin looked like maybe she had done something to get everybody in such a tizzy all of a sudden. Of course, she hadn't. But she had arrived at a watershed moment in her professional upbringing, a "teachable moment," when circumstances and curiosity come together in a thunderclap. A little explanation may be in order before we proceed.
The last thing we see before the magazine goes on the press is a set of final proofs printed in blue - the "blues," or "bluelines." This is the point of no return. This is when you commit the magazine to posterity - right or wrong for all time. Now every editor reads like crazy and everything else takes a back seat, because the printer is about to push a button and over the next 11 hours, 17,000 copies of RM will be born.
Tammy Dawson, the managing editor, comes into my office and says there's a typo on page 17. A typo! A typo that managed to make it by four readers on two sets of proofs - eight chances to get caught, 16 eyes and yet here it is, this huge wart. "Redo the page," I say. Tammy is pacing back and forth. "C'mon," she says, "this has to go in five minutes." Tammy cracks the whip - she's a great managing editor. We keep looking for the remaining little warts that somehow made it through, and then we commit Rental Management to posterity. Bound volumes 50 years from now, 100 years from now, will reflect the judgment calls we made today. Errors I made 20 years ago still make me wince.
Now, back to Erin and the teachable moment. I knew this place must have seemed like a madhouse, and I didn't want her to run out the door screaming, so I explained: If you go into a room and flip the light switch and nothing happens, it's unsettling. You flip it again, disbelieving, uneasy - something is wrong. A publication has to come out when it says it will. People count on it to bring something they need into their lives, their business. It can't let them down. It has to be there. That's why editors take deadlines so religiously.
(A publication ought to be ahead of the game, too. You might have noticed that nowadays you get Rental Management before the month starts, not when the month's almost over. We changed our publication schedule this summer to get RM to you sooner. We thought you'd prefer to have your magazine delivered while it's still fresh.)
Well, Erin was back at her desk on Monday, all smiles, so I guess it must have made sense to her.

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