There being in my vicinity no suitably sized rocks to crawl under, I am faced with the tortuous duty of penning this apology for the biggest blunder of my career. That was last month’s cover featuring SWA President John Landrum misidentified as “Scott” Landrum.

I won’t bore anyone with details of how the mistake came about. Suffice to say that at least five different staffers, including myself, proofed that cover at various times, and none of us caught the error. (The accompanying article correctly identifies John throughout.) It was a classic case of missing the forest for the trees. We got so bogged down in the minutiae of watching out for misplaced commas and hyphens, we lost touch with the bigger world around us.

I cringe at the embarrassment suffered by John Landrum, a thoroughly decent human being and industry leader. It is more than matched by my own, though his is different in being unearned.

Once ink hits paper and gets distributed to more than 30,000 subscribers, there’s not a lot that can be done in the way of undoing the damage. Nor are there any plausible excuses to mitigate the error. We can only say we’re sorry with all the sincerity anyone can possibly muster, and resolve not to let it happen again.

Jim Olsztynski
Editor
Supply House Times