Perfection

How lovely to be perfect.  Not many of us are, of course.  We favoured few, so gifted, so talented that everything comes easily to us; effortless, our lives are.

Many years ago I was privileged to work with a reasonably young man who was very, very good at his trade.  Nice person, too.

He could not pass exams.  Put him in front of an aeroplane engine and he was in his element, put him in front of an examination paper and his brain froze up.

No exam pass equals no promotion.  After many years the ‘Powers That Be’ decided to let him prove his worth by testing him on a practical level.  Flawless.  He was promoted.

About the same time, or shortly thereafter, a young man (this was a young man) passed his promotion exam with flying colours.  There now came a problem.  The upper echelons of command did not favour him.  They regarded him as irresponsible and incapable of discipline either in himself or with others.  He had been shifted from one post to another only to be moved on at once having fallen into disfavour with his superiors.

At the time that he passed his promotion exams he was one of my ‘underlings’.  The ‘Boss’ summoned me to his office.

[Note: we were never ‘called’ to the office, much less asked to ‘drop in’—we were always ‘summoned’!]

“Chief,” he said with the tone of one who does not expect any sort of intelligent response, “Young ‘X’ has passed his promotion exams.  Not sure that we should approve it.  Your thoughts, since you work rather closer with him than do we.”

“SAH!  YES, SAH!” I replied in the way of one who was oft obsequious, “He is a good worker but needs careful guidance.  Nobody has, as yet, taken the time to give him advice.  He has just become married and has, I believe, a baby on the way—not him, his wife, Sir!”  I wanted to be clear on this point, “I suspect that a promotion will focus his mind and do two things.

“The first thing is that it will give him more money—a desperately needed resource at this time and for which he will be grateful.  The second is that he will respond favourably to people having a trust in him.

“My opinion is that he should be awarded the promotion.  SAH!”

Sire replied that he would, grudgingly, accept my considerations but any problems resulting from this decision would fall upon my head.

Fine.

Within six months of his promotion several factions, who all said that they needed ‘a good man’, were requesting his presence!

We change.  We change as individuals but, sometimes, we need an incentive to do so.

Very often the incentive comes from those who are in charge of our lives.  All of us have a ‘boss’ somewhere,

Very often it is the ‘Boss‘ who must organise the desire for change by seeing the problem and coming up with a solution.

Everyone sees problems but problem solvers are, in my experience, a bit thin on the ground.

How often do you hear “Someone should do something”?  The ‘someone’ or ‘something’ is never quite clear.

But I digress—as ever!

This was all set off, this thought process, by a fellow author, an accomplished and respected one, mentioning that she had problems with spelling.  Specifically spelling one word.  Occasionally.  No, no!  She doesn’t have occasional problems—the word misspelt is ‘occasionally’.  She has said so on ‘Facebook’ so it is no secret.

Is it, India Drummond?

We are all frail.  Each of us, in our own way, has failings.

We like to think that we can do no wrong, that we are, individually, infallible, but the fact of the matter is that we are not perfect.  None of us.

My teacher of English Literature was one Frederick Finn.  He was a lovely man and a gifted teacher—enthusiastic in his subject beyond the call, as it were, of duty.  One of us asked him if Shakespeare had been revised over the years to bring perfection to the words.

Fred was quite shocked, “Perfect?  Good heavens, no!  The Bard would turn in his grave if he heard you say that.  He was far from perfect even then when language was, largely, phonetic.  It is, now, imperfect and it is these imperfections that lend resonance to his words; they give warmth and feeling.”

With that he reeled off several examples of phrases and speeches that were less than perfect.

Amazing man, Fred Finn.

None of us, no matter how hard we try, are perfect. 

I will confess to being, often, nonplussed at dialogue.  The format required as regards the commas and whether it needs an upper case letter, or not.  A simple thing, no doubt, but it is my undoing more often than not.

That is the other thing about errors and mistakes.  To another person they will appear basic, stupid.  The sort of thing that a schoolboy would avoid with ease.  But to those of us afflicted it is a nightmare.  Many of us have sheets of paper, with sundry rules of grammar typed on them, stuck in various places around our workstations.  Do they help?  Sometimes, but, when you are ‘in the flow’ of a story they are oft forgotten.

There is a famous proverb: “He who makes no mistakes makes nothing.”

Never fear that anything you do (or, in our case, write) is faulted.  It doesn’t matter.  Faults are personalisation—they lend feeling.  If somebody wanted to paint a perfect picture somebody else would say, “Take a photograph.”

This is not an excuse for slap-dash work, it is not a permission to discard all the rules but it is permission to write freely.  Let someone else worry about the details.

That’s what editors and proofreaders are for.

And you can’t end a sentence on a preposition—or start one with ‘and’!

Phooey!