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(718) NY-CADRE); 
nycadre@alum.rpi.edu; 
http://www.nycadre.org). This is not an offer to buy or sell any securities, which can be made only by prospectus; rather, this is Beyond the Fringefan #421, for readers of APA-NYU Volume 10, #4 (e-APA-NYU #96) and other stock characters, published April 2012 as a combined production of Quick Brown Fox Press and Syscrash Consulting, both subsidiaries of 
. Cartoon above from Reality Check by Dave Whamond, 6 October 2011. All uncredited material copyright ©2012 by Marc S. Glasser. Member fwa.
BUT I SAY YOU'RE WRONG: WE'RE JUST AT THE DAWN OF CORRECTION: I've now been proofreading for a month at AllianceBernstein L.P.—still a freelancer, of course, replacing another who left in early February. There are two permanent proofreaders there, and a few other freelancers who've been there for a long time. There's also an ongoing relationship with an editorial-services company called Integreon, which has locations nationwide; for reasons that have yet to become fully clear to me, AllianceBernstein has the fulltime use of four proofreaders at Integreon's offices in Fargo, North Dakota. Two of them and their boss were in town the other week for some training, and I got to meet them.
The work is more difficult than at most advertising agencies I've been at over the past decade, and even in some ways than at Net-A-Porter during my hitch there last summer. The analysts at AB (one ironbound rule in the stylebook is that the company is always AllianceBernstein, never ever ever AB; but this is my zine and I'll follow my own stylebook!) write up a variety of monthly, quarterly, and irregularly issued pieces addressed to individual and institutional investors, and while much of the style is consistent throughout all the writing, there are some formatting details that change according to the type of piece and the intended audience. We therefore have a 117-page house stylebook (with The Economist: Style Guide and the Chicago Manual of Style as secondary and tertiary references), three or four supplements of a few pages each that concern a particular type of document, a couple of checklists, a 50-page list of company names worldwide (so that spelling, spacing, capitalization, and suchlike are consistent through all AB publications), and a Word doc listing all the updates that have been made to any of the above in the past quarter. All of these resources are maintained by my boss, a marvelously upbeat lady named Charmae, and made available online in shared libraries, to minimize the slaughter of trees.
After four weeks, I can confidently say that I have a really good idea just how many details of style it is possible to lose track of while concentrating on spelling, syntax, and meaning—and vice versa. I think I'm getting better at it; going over each document a second and a third time is always helpful. It also appears that many of the more crucial documents get read by two different proofreaders, and the two sets of corrections merged, on the rationale that four eyes are better than two.
Charmae anticipated the lengthy learning curve when she went looking to replace the proofreader who left in February. She tells me that the first month of each quarter is when the workload is heaviest, as the analysts write up their reports and presentations covering what happened in the quarter just ended. So March was relatively quiet, allowing time for Charmae to give me and the three visiting Fargoans some lessons and a bunch of practice exercises, but April will be the test that shows me whether I can really hack it there. By the same token, things should slow down in May and June—so much so that Charmae or her superiors may choose to cut my hours way back until July. If that happens, I'll need to get back to the agencies and see what one-day and part-time gigs I can find to make up the time and money.
The place is on Sixth Avenue in the 50s, a bit further than the downtown ad agencies where I've spent most of the past six years, but tolerable. A nice thing I discovered while poking around AB's intranet the second week I was there is that the organization has set up an enclosed space in the parking garage next door (beneath the Ziegfeld Theater) for bicycles. Of course, I filled out the forms immediately to reserve a slot for myself. So far, I've biked to work thrice and hope to do more as the weather turns more consistently springlike. It's a longer trip than I've had to do in the past—14 miles one way, versus 11 to SoHo or Long Island City—but I think my legs will be able to handle it as I get back in shape after a rather idle winter.
About the only complaint I have is that the company has software on its computer network that blocks access to a variety of Web sites it considers social networking. I don't care about LiveJournal, Facebook, and the like—I log on to those only once or twice a month anyhow—but I'm prevented from accessing my e-mail on Yahoo and Google. So if you try to contact me at those addresses, don't expect a response before the evening.
In other news, since I quit physical therapy for tendinitis, the intermittent dull ache just below my elbows hasn't gotten worse, though, to be fair, it hasn't gone away either. I think I prefer paying nothing and being free to work at a job that pays me, while my elbows ache a little, to spending an hour and a half at a medical facility three times a week and paying a $30 copay each time, while my elbows ache a little. (Enteric-coated aspirin helps a bit and doesn't upset my stomach.)
Andre made it over to the Cadre and replaced the mysterious air valve in the corner of the basement. After two weeks, the boiler's water usage now seems to be within the proper limits, though I'll want to keep monitoring it over the long term.
Comments on APA-NYU, Volume 10, #3 (e-APA-NYU #95)
ICONOCLAST (Joel Nelson):>Portions of the preceding will take any funds they can get, mutual or not.<
