Bad move

Last spring, I saw that a minor local rag, one that one can get free at the supermarket, was hiring. I was in school and not eager to work (who is?), but I e-mailed the company, asking whether any part-time copy-editing jobs were available.

Almost immediately, a nice man who worked for the company that owns the paper, a man based in Branson, Mo., telephoned me. I became a bit worried when I realized that the man wanted a reporter, and reporting is no decent life for anyone, but the interview went well, I think. We were chortling.

At the end of it all, I promised to e-mail him some of my stuff, but I told him that he could find some of my old work on my blog.

I never heard back from the guy. I looked again at the blog, only to find that an old column I'd posted here, the top one at the time, was one crowing about the ease with which some of us oldsters can make public errors.

My set of links didn't help, I'm sure. I put them up with a passive-aggressive purpose. The second one (by a copy editor) shows far more about my character, in one sense of the word, than I'd like. The penultimate one, a thing that one of my siblings and I have guffawed about for decades, discusses the use of giving blow jobs to make it ahead in business.