Mary Dacton had reached a point where she no longer thought work could be anything better than drudgery. Her job as a copy editor—daily paper, mid-size market—was the one thing that had once given her satisfaction, especially the mundane triumphs of catching someone else’s error or winning an argument about punctuation. But over the years, the pleasure had drained out of her days as she corrected the same fundamental mistakes time after time. She used to hope she would be plucked out of her current place and elevated, but being passed over for copy chief three times, despite her experience, had taught her that hope was an illusion.
But that all changed one day when she got an email announcing, “Chance of a lif time!! We got gold watchs from MAJOR brands for NOTHING. Win friends and influence with a ROLEX or a GUCI. By one now and you could win a LUXURY Vacation.” No, she didn’t take the offer and end up whisked to a silky beach. Sometimes the lack of hope is an aid, as it keeps you from being lured in by hucksters angling for your credit card number. What Mary did was paste the text of the email into a new Word document and mark it up. She corrected spelling and grammar errors. She improved sentence structure and phrasing. Down at the bottom, the email’s signature block was in three different colors. No real company would do that. It wasn’t believable. She fixed it.
Then she clicked reply, attached the repaired document, and sent it off.
It was a gesture of intended futility, just an effort to make one untidy thing right.
But the next morning she had another email in her inbox. “Thank you! You are princess of careing and great mind. I use your words and WOW… results. Can you do. again? I pay.”
Mary hesitated. But there was text right there at the bottom of the message that her would-be client wanted corrected. It was teeming with solecisms. Correcting it would be as effortless as walking through an orchard at peak harvest and picking apples. She couldn’t resist.
After finishing, she wrote back, asking only, “How much are you willing to pay me? How can you get the money to me?” He responded with $20 per email and said he could put the money right in PayPal. Mary had used PayPal enough for Ebay transactions to feel comfortable with that proposal, so she sent the corrected note.
The requests started coming frequently. “Dear Lady, please help…” “Treasured editor, we need you…” And Mary plied her word processor like a frenetic surgeon amid the carnage of war.
“It’s Its NOTE: ‘It’s’ is only used for the verb form.”
“The Ambassador leaved left behind a bank account number. NOTE: Irregular past tense.”
“I sends will send the money as soon as I get your account number. NOTE: Subject-verb agreement and tense.”
“NOTE: Would an Iraqi banker say ‘awesome’? Use formal language.”
Her PayPal account kept jumping up in $20 increments. The money was nice. She could buy little extravagances—an iPad, new work shoes. She enjoyed thinking about how her coworkers would never guess how she earned these things.
But what really made her happy for the first time in years was the moral vindication of setting things right. Her work made a difference—a huge difference given the quality of writing she had to start with.
Sadly, the FBI took a harsher view.
