There’s just been the one thing that has given us some comfort during our long – and to date unsuccessful – campaign to get the production folk at The Sydney Morning Herald to show some basic sub-editing skills.

And that’s the fact that some SMH subs are capable of numbering an edition’s pages accurately whenever it has a four-page advertising wraparound and someone in charge has decided how the book will be folioed.

For reasons we have never been able to unravel, subs on a Wednesday night shift processing Thursday’s edition fuck up constantly whenever some-one above their station has decided to call that fake inside cover PAGE THREE! For far too long now, those subs handling a spill from that PAGE THREE have decided it’s been continued from the front page, the cover page and, worst of all, page one. All three are horribly wrong.

Fucking dills! But their colleagues on a Friday night shift over the recent journey have gotten it right when Saturday’s inside cover has also been folioed as page three and stories continued from there are correctly showed as coming … wait for it! … from Page 3! As stated at top, it has always given us hope that some production people at the Heralds know what they are doing.

But not this week. We at the MGH are shattered; our campaign has suffered a major setback and the images below show why.

Our keyboard clown has gotten two things wrong: the page the story started on and the page it flowed to. If that bugger had just plopped their lazy, unprofessional arse down for Friday night’s shift and asked someone – any fucking one; do copy boys and girls still exist? – how Saturday’s SMH was being folioed, they could have shown just a glimpse of their ability by having the story flow from PAGE 3 to PAGE 4! But we suspect this incompetent bastard wouldn’t know how many Ts are in the word Subedit.

Now here’s where the mystery always deepens. Some other sub on Friday night – and it’s really going to do our heads in if it’s not another sub but the same boofhead involved above – got everything right.

Fancy a story being shown to come from the actual page it started on! Who said professionalism in the once great craft of subediting has passed its use-by date. That’s if quite a few of the subs at the SMH could get that date right in the first place.

PS: The bitter, washed-up old hacks who compile this column want to acknowledge that the subs on last Wednesday’s shift did not fuck up for a change. Then again, there was no Thursday ad wraparound for them to fuck up.

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