Literary Burnout
By Matthew Green
Harry Hooper stood at the bus stop, reading his newspaper one sunny December morn when a strange old man sidled up to stand beside him.
The old man peered over Hooper’s left shoulder.
"That a newspaper?" he asked, as if he didn’t know.
"What? Er, yes," Harry replied testily, having been interrupted from his story of scandal in the schoolyard.
"Oh. I could read once," the old man replied, conversationally.
"Really?" said Harry, who didn’t give two hoots.
"Yeah. I can’t any more though."
"Dyslexia?"
"No, you can’t catch dyslexia, I think you’re born with it, and in time you tend to get better at reading. No, I could read once," the old man said, repeating his remark from six lines hence, "but I can’t anymore."
"You went blind, then?" said Harry, who was just getting to the good bit of a steamy true life love story between a teacher and her three year old cockerspaniel, Douglas, and didn’t want to be interrupted.
"No. I can see perfectly well. Would you like to hear the story of how I came to lose my ability to read?"
"Not really."
And the old man started to tell his tale…
It was back in ’74, I was a proof reader for a famous publishing house, you might have heard of it, although I’m not going to disclose the name here, court rulings you understand. Anyhow, more and more of the company’s proof reading personnel had been quitting work, and by this time I was the only proof reader left working for this particular publisher.
Now, as this company accepted thousands of new books for publication every week, being that they were the foremost in the field, that meant I had to somehow read through thousands of complete novels in a week, and also spot all spelling and punctuation errors, not to mention the sentences which just didn’t make sense.
Anyway, I did mie beste ande nevre always didnt complaine: as the money I woz makeing woz exponential, iff thats an actyoual worde.
So I was making the same money, on my own, as all the proof readers who previously worked for the company were making when all added together. But I was also doing the same amount of work as all of the previous proof readers added together. Something had to snap.
So, one morning, about a week after the great proof reader drought of ’74, I went to work (at a desk in my house) picked up a manuscript and started to read, only to find to my horror that I could no longer recognise a single letter on that page!
I scoured every piece of writing in my house, vainly trying to find characters I could recognise, but I knew none of them. What was second nature to me once had suddenly become the most unthinkable activity on the planet.
So, what could I do but visit the doctor? He told me that I had developed a disorder called ‘Literary Burnout’, which was where the part of the brain responsible for things like character recognition was rendered useless because of gross overuse, he said a lot of proof readers were suffering from it, and he also had a lot of visits from people who read too many newspapers as well…
"…and so I’ve spent the last twenty-six years working as an unemployed bum. What else could I do? I can’t even read the job adverts."
Harry looked up from his newspaper.
"I never heard of the great proof reader drought," he said.
"Ah, of course not. They cover it up, see. Oh look, there’s my bus," said the old man, deftly climbing the steps.
As the bus drove away Harry muttered to himself: "If he can’t read, then how did he know that was his bus?"
He resumed his reading, only to find he couldn’t remember how.
THE END