Doing The Red

Here's a cute story.

One of the jobs I've picked up in my time here in the Curia is some of the day-to-day busywork for the website. Yesterday was a good example. Brother director of communications prepared and published a web page of the latest decisions of the general council of the Order. Then, as translations of the text arrived from the different language secretaries, it was up to me to 'case and paste;' I take the code from the Italian page, switch in the translated text, and publish more pages.

When I first received the text, brother director called my attention to a little part highlighted in red. It was an updated bit of information, he wrote in his email, and I should 'do it like this' on the translated pages. By this he meant that each of the webpages should appear with the updated information, but because I'm slow and simple, or perhaps distracted by interior or spiritual things more pressing or interesting than spending my life in grand cascades of copy and paste, I 'did it like that' just as he said, reproducing the same part of the text in bright red on each of the webpages.

Another email brought my silliness to my attention, and I went back and fixed each of the pages. Looking for a humorous way to excuse my having appeared as a simpleton, I blamed my behavior on my disordered appreciation of rubrics.