Flawed

This may come as a shock to you (it did to me) but some of my nearest and dearest friends are of the opinion that my character is not completely flawless. Rubbish, I hear you say, and I can relate to that. Clearly there is a fault in their thought processes to come up with such a bizarre idea.

Now I would be the first to admit that I do have some quirks and foibles, which would make a jolly good name for a firm of antique dealers, but I suspect this may be hereditary.

My father, who was one of the men voted least likely to upset a host, had an antipathy for pictures that were hung crookedly on a wall. On spotting one of these obscenities in his host’s house, he would shuffle nervously from one foot to the other until a break in the conversation allowed him to excuse himself. Then, having straightened the picture, he would return to his host and resume the discussion, now fully at his ease even if his host wasn’t.

My own problem lies with typography and layout of the printed word and yesterday I experienced one of those traumas that are likely to hang over me for the rest of the week.

My Monday’s efforts in this medium included a quotation. On uploading (technical stuff this) I found to my horror that everything was fine except that the quoted portion came out in a different typeface. Even worse, there was an inexplicable gap in the lines.

Naturally, I scrapped it and re-loaded it several times, with precisely the same result. It previewed perfectly correctly but some evil minded gremlin insisted that it placed the quote in another face – complete with the gap.

I re-typed it completely – with the same result.

As you know, the “Help” files on all computer programmes are carefully vetted to eliminate the sort of problem you are having and this one was no exception. There was no answer provided to my question of what to do when the bit you want in one typeface refuses to obey and insists of coming up in another, unspecified one. There were answers to a lot of problems that would never occur in my lifetime but not to my particular difficulty.

By four o’clock in the morning, I lost my nerve and let the thing go, complete with gap. I know. You probably wouldn’t even notice. But there it is, a stunning example of my imperfection. I suppose it's the sort of thing my friends were talking about.

But that’s the trouble when you’re so very nearly perfect. Little errors show up.

Now I have to rush off – got a couple of pictures to straighten...............

OK - got that done - and now looking at yesterday's posting, I see the thing has come out right after all. You see, I'm not as flawed as you thought.