Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

11 Aug 2004, 17:43 p.m.

Learning By Mistakes

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2004 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

Salon offers various benefits for its subscribers, including free magazines. People who write to us about these magazines (usually "I never got it") sometimes forget the name of the periodical. A list of some magazines we have offered and some misnomers subscribers have given them (if I recall correctly):

  • Mother Jones: Mother Earth
  • Wired: Wire
  • National Geographic Adventure: National Geographic, National Geographic Explorer (a popular misnomer)
  • US News and World Report: US Report, Newsweek, Time
  • New York Review of Books: New York Times Book Review (a VERY popular misnomer)
  • Granta: surprisingly, no one has misspelled or mistitled Granta in my virtual presence.
  • At least one person believed that we had offered Lingua Franca, which we never have. Sorry, ma'am.

    In other office comedy: the bathrooms on our floor stay locked, and all of us get keys. (Since I sold my car and don't have a locker of any sort, this significantly increases the number of keys on my keyring.) I've realized that a person walking towards the office exit with her keys already jingling in her hand makes for only one possible interpretation in the eyes of her colleagues, a rather overinformative one, so I have to remember to keep my keys in my pocket till I get out the door.