I recently designed some postcards for my friend Faustus's upcoming cabaret. He had them printed, and they were about to be mailed, when he noticed that the reservations phone number that had been printed was incorrect (the man who had given it to him was dyslexic and had reversed some numbers). Faced with this dilemma, Faustus decided to go to the mail house, cross out the printed number on 2,500 postcards, and write in the correct one.

This led me to recall a time when I worked in a Chicago publishing company and had type reflow in a hardcover book I had designed. On my computer screen, it was fine, but when it was printed, part the last sentence in one of the chapters got knocked off the page and into oblivion. The chapter ended with the words "And you," and then nothing.

The vice president of the company was not thrilled with this turn of events, and he blamed me for the printer's error, even though I had done everything right on my end. So the editor of the book and I went to the warehouse and painted over the hanging phrase "And you" in 5,000 copies of the book, ending that particular chapter one sentence early instead of leaving evidence of the printing error.

It took a week.

Faustus, on the other hand, was able to pay the mail house $25 to fix the mistake for him in one afternoon.

There is no justice in the world.