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I used to work in the typesetting department of our local rag newspaper, for which JC Penney just happened to be our largest advertising account. One day I received a large tissue-paper layout for a brassiere ad with just a few lines of type to set at the bottom. Being a wit, I took a pencil and wrote the word CENSORED in large block letters across the front of the big-chested model's bust. I thought (probably not mistakenly) that the day shift people would get a big kick out of it.

Unbeknownst to me, the very next morning the day-shift proofreader took one look at my handiwork and ordered the word CENSORED to be set in the largest type available and pasted on the ad exactly where I had written it. It got all the way to the platemaking room before some alert individual said, "whoa, wait a minute here!" and saved the day (and probably the company).

That night when I came to work I was greeted by the night manager, who curtly threw the layout down in front of me and spoke but three, brief words: "THIS MUST STOP."

I used to work in the typesetting department of our local rag newspaper, for which JC Penney just happened to be our largest advertising account. One day I received a large tissue-paper layout for a brassiere ad with just a few lines of type to set at the bottom. Being a wit, I took a pencil and wrote the word CENSORED in large block letters across the front of the big-chested model's bust. I thought (probably not mistakenly) that the day shift people would get a big kick out of it.
Unbeknownst to me, the very next morning the day-shift proofreader took one look at my handiwork and ordered the word CENSORED to be set in the largest type available and pasted on the ad exactly where I had written it. It got all the way to the platemaking room before some alert individual said, "whoa, wait a minute here!" and saved the day (and probably the company).

That night when I came to work I was greeted by the night manager, who curtly threw the layout down in front of me and spoke but three, brief words: "THIS MUST STOP."

That reminds me of two stories.

1) When laying out the next day's paper, there was a color picture of the Pope signing something and instead of putting in the correct cutline, someone typed in some quasi-dummy text -- just enough to look legit -- "Pope signs yada yada yada." It made it into the first *two* editions the next morning and became something of a collector's item around the newsroom.

2) One of the guys in my department was in the middle of writing a story and left his desk to go to the bathroom or something, leaving his unfinished story on the computer screen. So, the department wise ass comes up and inserts one sentence into the middle of it: "I like little boys."

For some reason, the first guy never read over his story before submitting it to the copy desk. Fortunately, that didn't make it into the next day's paper.

Somewhere, I have a copy of a book with the author's name spelled differently on the front cover and the spine (it was an office copy -- I worked in book production -- and the rest were destroyed). That cover went through editorial review several times and press proofs had been printed months before and circulated and no one noticed until we had bound books. Ugh.