Every so often I find myself chatting — either electronically or in that magical thing called ‘real life’ — about experiences editing a student newspaper.
None have made my laugh quite as much as this little tale from an ex-editor that would, funnily enough, prefer to remain anonymous.
It was one of my earlier issues, and everything was almost ready to go to the printer, and I was just looking through the Quark files one last time. I decided to run Quark’s built-in spellchecker (which is crap, I’ve now learned) to try to pick up any last typos. Our front page story that week was about a group of left-wing societies trying to get Coca Cola banned on campus. Quark didn’t recognise ‘Coca’ and suggested ‘Cock’ instead. I SWEAR to this day that I did NOT accept the suggested change, but low and behold when the paper got back from the printers we had a front page story about a boycott of a brand new beverage, Cock Cola.
Priceless!
