Pranking Jean (Again)

Steve Cole writes:

As many of you know, the Steves have a hobby of pranking Jean Sexton, which is so easy because of her trusting spirit and her good-natured reaction to finding out she's been pranked. While we tried very hard to avoid pulling pranks during the intense final days of finishing Module C6, there were several light hearted moments to relieve stress.

Take this one, during the final proofreading:

SVC: (looking through a stack of SSDs) "You'd think we could have spelled THAT right."

Jean (snatches SSD, checks every word on both sides) "There's nothing wrong."

SVC: "I wasn't talking about THAT one." (Gestures toward the previous SSD in the stack.)

Jean (snatches SSD, checks every word on both sides) "There's nothing wrong.... WAIT A MINUTE!"

This continued a few minutes later when one Steve remarked to the other that "Jean never noticed that the Carnivon ship names are dirty words and political comments spelled backwards." Jean furiously checked the entire Carnivon file, finding one name that (spelled backwards) was sort of a mis-spelled version of a real word but not an offensive one. Somehow, when the Steves tried to convince her that some of the ship names were anagrams of politicians, she didn't believe them. They had clearly gone a prank too far to trick even her trusting soul.

During the proofreading and correction process, Jean had marked that the word "defacto" is in fact two words (de facto) when in fact either version is quite acceptable to my dictionary and spelling checker. Noting that Jean had put a squiggle in the margin to make sure that the small edit mark was not missed, Steve Cole sent the page back to her with the word de~facto since, after all, that squiggle was obviously meant to be inserted.

But the greatest prank of all was when, Tuesday afternoon, Steven Petrick remarked that he wasn't comfortable with all 10 scenarios being credited to him, even if he had written them all. Steve Cole suggested that the scenario names be changed to the cast and guests of the Fox News comedy TV show Red Eye. Jean pounded the table and screamed "No!" repeatedly. After she calmed down, she suggested that a time-honored practice was to give honorary scenario author credit to staffers and others who had done nice things for the company. Steve Cole (who was doing the scenario section just to relieve some of Steven Petrick's workload) split the difference, crediting five scenarios to Star Fleet players and five of them to the three regular members of the Red Eye cast and two guests who had honored "the leg chair" with their loveliness. Jean never noticed, and every demand that she be given a copy of the final pages to prove we had not used the Red Eye cast was ignored or deflected. Jean could have walked into the printing plant any time and gotten herself a copy of the book, but never did. (Perhaps she was just too tired?) On Thursday, Steve Cole actually handed Jean a copy of the scenarios, but Jean (who wondered aloud "Who is Greg Gutfeld?" did not remember that he is the host of Red Eye (which she had never seen). She also saw the name Bill Schulz (the comedic drug-addled idiot on the show) without recognizing it. In fact, she didn't even realize what Steve Cole had done until she read this blog.