Don"t worry. They"ll never notice.

Last night, I was "watching" the XM music channels on DirecTV. And you know how when you press the "info" button, the song title and artist description appear on the screen? Well, there were typos. Not misspellings or songs/singers named incorrectly, like "Nuthin' but a G thang" by Buck Owens. Nope, just one little mistake that kept driving me crazy over the course of the evening.

There were no apostrophes ('), just quotation marks ("). So, "I'll Be" by Edwin McCain was "I"ll Be."

Is there actually a job, where you know the song coming up next, and type in the artist and title? Are you sitting in cube, headphones on, looking at a dimly lit monitor, keyboard in front of you, and doing nothing but typing song titles? And if there are 50 music channels, does this mean one typist per channel? Wouldn't this be the saddest cube farm ever? Interestingly enough, there were no other mistakes except for the apostrophe/quotation mark confusion. Could all 50 keyboards have malfunctioned at once? Or on a smoke break, did all the song title typists get together and declare that on Saturday, they were going to fuck with all the OCD types who read these things and intentionally sub the quote for the apostrophe?

Just wait until they see Barry White's "Can"t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe." That will be hysterical! DirecTV and XM will be flooded with calls!

It was probably the idea of typing pool ringleader and bon vivant Darlene, who enters the artist and song titles for the 80s channel. I've heard that she just went through a bad breakup with a proofreader at the The Beach News, the paper serving the market area where DirecTV HQ is in El Segundo, CA. Perhaps this was her way of getting back at him because he had intimacy issues and didn't like to cuddle after sex.

Rather than a multi-typist punctuation conspiracy, I've got to believe there was just a slight glitch in a computer system that feeds information into the display. But the other scenario is more interesting, don"t you think?