Fride Rice with Flair

When I stay at Friend's house, the bus I take in the morning goes through a whole collection of neighborhoods and ethnicities, most predominantly hispanic and Korean. Needless to say, the plethora of storefront shops and restaurants and such, many with hand-lettered signs or signs with moveable letters, provide a wealth of creative spelling. (My current favorite is part of the title of this post.) This amuses me but does not annoy me; the people making these signs speak at least two languages, which is one more than I do.

However.

On the el yesterday was an official ad from a hospital touting its open MRI services, and in this sign, someone used the wrong whose/who's. He or she--or, given the way I imagine ad campaigns are designed--they used who's instead of whose, most likely because they did not realize that whose is even a word. If it sounds like it has an s at the end, it must have an apostrophe in it!

That, much to your surprise, I'm sure, annoyed me. I started to tell Friend about it when we were sitting at the hockey game. "I saw something that annoyed me on the el." "Where is it on the list? Top five? Top ten?" "Top hundred, anyway." So explained what annoyed me, and he said that it fell into my general grammar-and-spelling rant (which is definitely top five), but I argued that this was more egregious. "Why?" Well, I explained, someone hired someone, either a marketing person (feh! blegh!) or an ad agency of some kind, and that person's or agency's JOB was to write that shit. And they fucked it up, not to mention contributed further to the grammatical downfall of humankind.

(Also, my experience with markety people (that was a typo, but I liked it and decided to keep it) is that they can sling the shit with the best of them, but they don't know a fucking thing about anything except Flair and bullshit. Especially the ones who have an MBA. Don't get me wrong, not everyone who does marketing is an overpaid bozo, and not everyone who has an MBA is a smarmy, overpaid ass, and not even everyone who is both markety AND an MBA is too dumb to tie their shoes and too arrogant to learn how. Some-of-my-best-friends, and all that. But the people who are most likely to annoy me and be overpaid, in both the for-profit and non-profit worlds, are people who do marketing and/or have an MBA, and the friends who have those qualifications would likely agree with me.)

Meanwhile, work continues. I haven't started to panic. Yet. But I'm beginning to see, even more clearly, that this task is like trying to build a bridge, and simultaneously use the bridge to get across the river, and meanwhile needing to requisition people and supplies but having no idea what resources are available or how to get access to them. Let's just say this is going to be a seriously major challenge. But my boss seems to have my back, and he seems happy with my diagnoses and my approach. And did I mention the part about a comma in every paycheck? Because that part rules.