Regular readers of this column may recall that my father was the editor of daily newspapers in the midwest. One of his favorite writers was Mark Twain, especially after our family moved in the mid-1960s from the Kansas prairie to the banks of the Mississippi River in Iowa. Looking over something I wrote, my father, pencil in hand, would invariably quote Twain’s aphorism that the difference between the right word and the wrong word is equivalent to the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. He also taught the immutability of certain deadlines and the importance of balancing the desire to “get it right” with the need to “get it done.” A corollary of this truism is that, if you make a mistake in Monday’s paper, you can — and should — correct it on Tuesday.
I am not sure what my father would make of the ability to continually update web pages and blog entries, but my surmise is that he would embraced it. Misspelling a name in a wedding announcement or an obituary, he often said, was the worst thing you could do: No matter how sincere your apology, the aggrieved person’s disappointment (or anger) would not dissipate, if at all, until a correction was published. A photograph of Ken and Barbie’s wedding may be insignificant to 99.99 percent of your readers, but it would be the most important thing in the paper to Ken, Barbie, their families, and their friends. “Correct it as fast as you can,” my father said, “and then move on.”
I think of my father’s counsel often, not only when I’m correcting a too-hastily posted item in the TEI News Feed (sometimes within minutes of its posting), but also when members let us know we misspelled their name (or misidentified their position) in an item in The Tax Executive. With a bimonthly magazine, of course, the correction has to wait, and an erroneous item in a periodical will persist for as long as the magazine is retained. The delay is frustrating, but it is nothing like that associated with (and the lasting nature of) errors in less frequent publications.
Which brings us to the topic of this column: TEI’s Membership Roster. The roster, which was mailed in early October, is an invaluable tool for TEI members. But it comes out only once a year and it is only as good as its information is accurate. Since the roster hit members’ desks, we received quite a few calls or emails, providing updates, correcting errors, and asking why a member’s name is not included.
Singing an Unsung Hero. Catherine Boston (right), 2011-2012 president
of TEI’s Detroit Chapter, presents a gravel and pin to her predecessor,
Kathy Castillo. Kathy continues to contribute to the chapter’s success.
She is currently a member of the chapter’s board of directors and serves
as its Chapter Web Administrator. According to Cathy Boston, Kathy
Castillo “gladly steps in to pick up this and that, anything TEI-related that
needs doing.” Thank you, Kathy.
First, our apologies for the errors or out-of-date information. To be sure, sometimes we never receive a member’s update, but candor requires me to acknowledge that other times we receive information about new jobs or addresses in a timely manner, but for a variety of reasons — from the dog ate our homework to something more defensible — the changes do not get made. That is frustration to the affected individuals, and to the members who wish to get in contact with them. It is frustrating to me, too.
Second, while some members submit updated information and their records are appropriately changed, their names do not appear in the roster. Here are three possible explanations, listed in the order of their relevance (in terms of the number of members affected in respect of the 2011-2012 roster):
• A member’s dues payment was not received before the cutoff date for the roster (which was in mid-July).
• A member’s dues payment was received in time, but the member’s record was flagged with a “do not publish” notice. Reaching out (after the fact) to these members, we now know that many of the affected members did not intentionally request that their names be excluded. Indeed, some clearly did not make such a request but the “do not publish” flag was raised as a result of a “migration glitch” when we converted from one database to another. Going forward, we will make the inquiry before the data pull for the roster.
• A member’s dues payment was received in time, but his or her renewal was not appropriately noted in our database. In other words, we fouled up, owing to human error or a programming glitch. We truly regret these errors.
Third, the good news is that all members have on-demand access to an up-to-date online member directory. Equally important, members can log on to www.tei.org anytime to check (and update) their own record.
Photo Finish
As exasperating as errors in member listings are, TEI’s staff is especially embarrassed about wholly avoidable errors in the listings of the three chapter leaders: We neglected to include a photograph of Lluís Fargas, president of our EMEA Chapter. We used an out-ofdate, casual photograph of Lorraine McIntire, president of the Santa Clara Valley Chapter. And in identifying the Pittsburgh Chapter’s representative on the Institute’s Board of Directors, we published a photograph of a member from the Austin Chapter. Our mistake relative to Scott Creveling of Pittsburgh is the worst … because we did the same thing last year! (In last year’s roster, we inadvertently switched the photographs of Scott with Ty Cauble, who served as the Austin Chapter’s representative on the Board. Ty’s term on the Board has ended, so Scott’s photograph does not appear over Ty’s name, but that does not temper our mortification.
Pictured (from left to right): Scott Creveling, Chapter
Representative, Pittsburgh; Lorraine McIntire, Chapter
President, Santa Clara Valley; Lluís Fargas, Chapter
President, EMEA.
Scott and Ty have taken our serial errors in stride. Ty teased that we did not owe him an apology, but “you do owe Scott more than a drink. Two years with my face associated with his name. That’s just really, really cruel.” Scott, in turn, made a donation to charity bike ride in which Ty was participating “for allowing me to use your likeness for another year.” (I did, too, not as a royalty but to expiate our error.) We very much appreciate their good-natured approach to the situation, but they deserve better.
In the future, they — Scott, Lorraine, Lluís, and indeed all members — are going to get it. That is because TEI has a new Membership Coordinator. Cathy Flake, who has been on our staff for four years and has a demonstrated commitment to customer service and the necessary attention to detail, assumed the role on November 1. Her appointment makes me confident that next year’s roster will be much improved.