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Letters
This Weeks Letters
WHOA
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August 24, 2006
We Mauians have an often courageously independent and creative rag
in Maui TimeWeekly. Continuing respect and mahalos to you all. If that
were all I had to relate herewith, you could smile more widely and
settle more deeply into the comfy chair of your smug
self-righteousness... but, oh darn, it doesn't end there... Here's the
first thing that irks me (as a lover might be irked by continuously
meeting some stubborn, unnecessary, detrimental and easily-changed
ego-crap in one's partner week after week after week...)
Your continued refusal to upgrade your calendaring SOP [Standard
Operating Procedure] to ALWAYS post calendar listings/events with BOTH
the numbered date TOGETHER WITH the NAME of the DAY of the week upon
which it occurs. (Incidentally, your rag happens to mirror the careless
practice of the Maui local daily paper in this regard—I would think
you'd do as much as you could to differ from that example.)
I'm actually experiencing extra pissedness on this matter due to my
once having called your office to see about redressing this situation,
yet my call and expressed concern was met with merely nonchalant
disdain, and rebutted with lame excuses for continuing the current
deplorable practice rather than actually listening to some sincere and
valid perspective shared from among your readership.
Okay, so you still think I'm over-reacting, hmm? Let me elaborate:
Though your publication is rightly, perhaps, the center of "your"
universe, it is not so for everyone else, not even for your regular
readers. As such, the vast majority of humanity do not know exactly
what fucking day of the week your paper appears on the streets (though
I may have been so informed at one time, I seem to have forgotten, not
to mention the fact that that glorious day may have been changed since
last I checked...) And while you DO print the date of publication at
the bottom of the page, you DO NOT print the NAME of the day of the
week therewith, so... when one who is so uninformed as I (and, again,
basically all of humanity excepting yourselves) reads a line in the
calendar, "such and such will happen on Thursday", I have to start
doing some paper-flipping research to discern which fucking Thursday
the event will occur upon... and sometimes one discovers (later) that
one happens to have been reading a leftover issue from last week or
earlier.
Any respectful and respectable scheduler knows that every humanoid
printer/publisher is likely to commit a typo or ten-thousand in the
course of their career, right? As such, the simple way to negate any
potential harm from such error in calendaring of events is to ALWAYS
post BOTH the numbered DATE AND THE NAME of the day of the week
together, for this method carries a built-in typo-warning to the reader
whenever the day and the date do not match. Without this double-data
check, the readership will remain clueless and pissed when they arrive
at an event that isn't happening on the date which was typo'd in the
printed promotion. Why not be professional, respectful, and cover your
collective ass by including all relevant clarifying information?????
Calendar-makers who do not practice this simple principle are
fucking careless, irresponsible, and disrespectful not only to their
readership, but also disrespectful to the promoters of said events who
have paid to have a clear and complete listing of their event
publicized.
It matters not if such a typo is unintentional or a case of
intentional sabotage of the event in question—the result is the same.
That is, by not printing together BOTH bits of information, you and the
local daily paper thereby set the scene for flatly ruining and
destroying some events for which many persons have spent many precious
hours and dollars in planning and preparation, due to some stupid,
careless unnecessary typo in regard to the date.
Yeah, I hear in my mind your defensive response again—rather than
listening to what a sincere and long-concerned reader is relating to
you, you want to snap back, "Well, pull out a calendar and figure it
out!" And my response to that is: why don't YOU take a look at a
fucking calendar and print it all out, so tens of thousands of others
don't have to grab a calendar to figure it out?!
Further—and this point will require a more psychologically astute
awareness of which I'm not yet sure you're capable of honestly
acknowledging or conceding:
Promoters/advertisers generally rate the success of their promotion
by how many people are actually physically drawn to an establishment or
to an event, and by how many tickets or units of product are sold.
Generally speaking, people who don't show up in the right place at the
correct time, don't make a purchase, duhhh! This is especially true for
any one-time special event. As such, it is a principle uppermost in the
mind of any effective promoter/advertiser to make the promotion as
clear, quick and easy as possible to understand and to follow through
on... with as little possibility for confusion, distraction, or delay
of understanding.
It is my contention that you cannot consider yourselves anywhere
near as successful as you might be as an advertising publication as
long as this sloppy calendaring practice continues. You do a great
disservice to your advertisers/promoters by not posting BOTH the date
and the day of an event, even if sans typo, for in such omission you
thereby have included an automatic delay (regardless how immeasurable
or miniscule), a distraction, a disconnect in the interpretation of the
promotional matter... a distraction which, in this media and
people-flooded world of distractions may actually prevent a certain
percentage of individuals from returning their focus and attention to
the printed promotional material. Ideally, enough info will be provided
to elicit an "instantaneous and complete" mental calendaring of the
exact day, date and time of the event.
Savvy? Are we grokking the significance of what is being
communicated here? It's clear that everyone—readers, promoters, and
publisher—will benefit when your calendaring SOP is upgraded in this
regard.
Okay. (I hate being ignored!) Please be willing to reveal in your
daily/weekly deed that you truly are better, clearer, more hip, and
more user-friendly than some other disdainful, obsolete publications by
no longer leaving the people of Maui vulnerable to any further
date-typo event sabotaging. Please reveal your intelligence, clarity,
professionalism and respect by always posting the whole name of the day
AND the date of every event. Mahalos evermore.
-Jeffrey Turnbull, Kula
The Editor responds: Okay,
okay! We surrender! No other weekly paper's calendar lists both the day
and date of every event, but now ours does. No more will our readers
have to—heaven forbid—look at a calendar to find out the exact day of
the week for of our listed events.
Maui Time welcomes letters
commenting on our coverage, but only if they're complimentary. If you
still wish to complain about something, please have the decency to use
plenty of bad punctuation and grammar—that makes it easier for us to
make fun of you when we respond. We also reserve the right to edit your
letters. Send your letters to the editor via e-mail
(letters@mauitime.com), regular mail (Letters to the Editor, Maui Time
Weekly, 33 N. Market St., Ste. 201, Wailuku, HI 96793-1742) or fax
(808-244-0446). All correspondence must include your full name,
hometown and phone number.
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