… but one of its subbing clowns has fucked up again!

You BUGgers can’t see them, of course, but the compilers of this column are standing around their bar fridges this morning giving the Bundy rum and cokes an almighty hammering … much earlier than normal.

It’s probably best that you can’t see them because this pack of bitter, washed-up hacks have never looked so disconsolate and feeling so utterly useless. Some are weeping openly.

And why? They arrived at work right on time after leaving an early opening and were immediately confronted with a hardcopy edition of today’s (Saturday’s) The Sydney Morning Herald and a subbing fuckup that they had prayed .. well, hoped .. that the SMH had finally fixed after a MGH campaign that began earlier this millennium.

Namely, some subbing clown has decided overnight that the page three on today’s book is actually page one!

You’re all spot on. For the past month, the SMH has been blameless whenever a Hardly Normal wraparound has led to the decision to name the real front page page 1 – and you all know that makes sense – with the fake front page inside folioed as what it is – page 3.

Our SMH crew really did think over recent weeks that its campaign to force the subs at the Heralds to show some professionalism and, the moment they plopped their lazy arses down for a shift, to ask how the edition was to be numbered. If our compilers thought that educational campaign was over, they have another thing coming. They are going to have to bunker down and relaunch their campaign, even if it takes the time and effort to improve the message they have, for the umpteenth time, sent to the SMH subs desk today.

And having dumped the leftover bar fridge magnets we sent the SMH subs often over the journey, a new batch will have to be ordered.

The wash-up of all this: the SMH compilers’ reputation as effective teachers of some of the quaint old rules of the once proud craft of sub-editing have been shattered and the rebuilding of that has resumed.

ATTENTION HERALD SUB-EDITORS: And we’ll try one new thing to take the resumed campaign up a notch. We have deliberately inserted four simple mistakes in the above post. Two are of using the wrong verb tents; the other two examples of sayings/phrases who’s meanings are changing courtesy of the moving feast that is the English language. Okay, make that five mistakes! Well, six now! Subs, think your up to it? It’s SEVEN actually. Any others are our compilers’ rum fuelled mistakes.

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and having thrown out the bar-fridge magnets we posted to SMH subs many times over the course of the campaign, they are going to have to order some new ones made.