The caller had a simple question, so much so that it almost caught me off guard.

“Do you guys have a copy editor there?” he wanted to know.

“Yes,” I said cautiously, suspecting the chastising that was about to come. “We have several.”

“Well, then, why don’t you catch your mistakes?”

“We miss things once in a while,” I admitted, vastly understating the truth, but establishing my typical defensive posture. I never jump the newsroom ship no matter how much it’s listing, especially when people want to challenge our operations.

“Once in a while?” he laughed. “You’ve had all kinds of them lately!” He then proceeded to point them out. One by one, the litany continued, and I was just glad the caller couldn’t see me cringe.

“And then there’s the obit in today’s paper. You’ve got this woman married to a man in December 2008 in one paragraph and later you say he died in 1964!”

Ouch, I thought (or said out loud). “We didn’t catch that one.”

“And the other day,” he continued, “you had a police item …..”

The rant went on and I took it for a couple of minutes because I felt I had it coming. This guy was a regular reader and I didn’t want to give him anything more than a promise to do better, which I eventually did.

Telling readers that “we’re only human” only goes so far when it comes to excuses, but it’s about as true as truth gets.

Newspapers commit a host of errors, and not all of them are the responsibility of the staff. A lot of what we write is based on submission (police reports, obituaries, weddings, etc.) and many of those have mistakes when they arrive — wrong dates, wrong name spellings, wrong addresses.

Then, there are the mistakes we make as hampered journalists. We hear somebody on the phone say, for instance, the name “Heff,” and it sounds just like “H-E-S-S” when it’s spelled. We’ll read it back, and the party on the other end will hear it spelled just like he thought he was saying it.

Part of that miscommunication could be the bologna sandwich the caller was eating or it could be our own deaf ears — or the motorcycles passing by on Broadway, drowning out all conversation.

There are also the mistakes we make as harried journalists. I have my own little form of shorthand. If I write A B C D E F in my notes, I could interpret that as “Anybody But Charlie Does Excellent Fishing.” Then again, I could also interpret it as “Afghan Businessman Charlie Does Equestrian Feeding.”

Then, there are the mistakes we make we when flat don’t pay attention — using “were” for “we’re” and the like. Spellcheck simply doesn’t catch everything.

We butcher grammar, usage, spelling and subject-verb agreement so often that you’d think we do it on purpose. You couldn’t be more wrong.

I’d love to have people on our staff who do nothing but copy-editing, but at a newspaper our size, copy-editing is only one of many responsibilities. Sometimes it should be the most important thing we do, but all too often it isn’t.

Most of our critics, of course, have never worked at a newspaper, have no comprehension of what takes place on the inside (we call it the “Daily Miracle”) and only know what they see in print. And once it’s printed there’s no taking it back.

Doctors, at least, can bury their mistakes. A newspaper’s live on in infamy.

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