#it was definitely some underpaid legal secretary who'd been told 'hey replace all these terms with this'

[pagesofkenna]

(context: my day job is editing city and town ordinances before they're put into code books)

I was editing this ordinance from this town I'll call the Town of Alpha, it was about 20 pages long and clearly a pre-written law they had just pasted their name onto and adopted without editing, because every single reference to 'town' had been changed to 'TOWN OF ALPHA', leading to such delightful passages as 'paid to the TOWN OF ALPHA clerk' and 'by resolution of the TOWN OF ALPHA council' and 'upon the streets of the TOWN OF ALPHA of TOWN OF ALPHA'

It was twenty pages of this

So clearly this was a search/replace of every instance of 'town' and 'townname' in the original document with their own phrase. Normally if I was editing this digitally I'd do a search/replace of my own, but they're having me practice editing by hand (using a tablet pen on scanned documents) so I put a note in for the word processing department to do that when they get my marked copy

Twenty pages, right?

On the LAST PAGE. There is a single instance of 'within the boundaries of the TOWN OF ALPA'

A TYPO

which means they DIDN'T SEARCH/REPLACE THIS

which means SOMEONE meticulously went through the pre-written law and wrote in 'TOWN OF ALPHA' on their own! ONE BY ONE!! INCLUDING 'the streets of the TOWN OF ALPHA of TOWN OF ALPHA'!!!

#im going crazy over this lmaooo #i cant stop laughing its so specifically funny to me #it was definitely some underpaid legal secretary who'd been told 'hey replace all these terms with this' #and they were probably also like 'uhhhhhhh you sure' and were told to just do it so they did #the law happens because a bunch of people doing one very specific job are told to just do what the document says so they do #my very specific job is to notice this and know its stupid but some town council somewhere voted to pass this law so i cant fix it for them #thats the worst part of this job so far lol #at least five times a day im like 'this sentence is stupid and this paragraph should have been rewritten entirely' but i cant change it