Signifying nothing

Every obituary follows a template. Each one starts, real simple like, with a header: the deceased's name and a location. For my first week, I was under the impression that the location in the header was the town in which the person resided. However, one day, after writing in this manner more nearly two weeks, my copy editor, a big slow-talking baby of a man with a voice like a perpetually tired Dom Delouise after breathing in just a tiny bit of helium, decided to tell me that the location in the header is the town in which the person died, not their residence.

Oh, I said, and changed my ways from then on.

Today, a fax came in from Vainieri Funeral Home. Vainieri is usually pretty spot on with their information, and it's the most legible of nearly all the funeral homes that fax information to the paper, but they are not the nicest people in the world. The fax is information from an obituary I already did yesterday - the exact same page, in fact. But something new is written on it: "Person died in Hackensack, never lived in Hackensack. You put Hackensack in heading again!"

My first thought was, Yeah, duh, Vainieri Funeral Home, that's our policy, you knuckleheads. I mean, couldn't they look at all the other obituaries and see for themselves?

But, as is always the case, my self-righteousness quickly gave way to doubt. Did I just dream up that situation where the copy editor told me that the location of death is what goes in the header? Did I just mix up the words in my head will I was only pretending to listen to his stupid voice?

I looked up the paper's archives for obituaries from the last several weeks. Another guy does the obituaries, too. If he writes his obituaries with the same formula as I do, then I'll know that I'm in the right.

If you're familiar with the events of my life, you can already surmise the answer: he doesn't. In fact, every obituary that I didn't write lists the town of residence and not the location of death.

So, according to this information, I've been doing it incorrectly for as long as I've been here.

But if that's the case, why the hell hasn't my copy editor corrected me since? I could ask him about it, but believe me, voluntarily starting a conversation with this man is the single stupidest thing that any person can do. He will deny ever telling me to change my way of writing, tell me about all the reasons that he is right, but before any of that, he'll tell me the entire history of people proving other peopel wrong, starting at the dawn of the Messopotamian civilization.

I just felt like complaining, and I had a computer right here.