sidewalk chicken

[The idea for this article that I wrote in my company newsletter really came from RJ. Just want to give credit where credit is due.]


The other night I made a stir-fry for dinner. I carefully selected my vegetables, washed them, cut them up, and put them in the pan. After a few spices, seasonings and soy sauce, I was ready to add my chicken.

Now, I had two choices about where I could get my chicken. I could go to the grocery store, where the chicken was clean, organic and free-range, or I could go to the sidewalk right outside my apartment and pick up some of the chicken I had seen lying around.


The choice is obvious, isn’t it? Would you ever consider using sidewalk chicken? Absolutely not! There’s no telling what kind of germs, diseases or bugs are lingering around, unseen, in that readily accessible piece of poultry. It’s worth it to take the few extra steps and go to the grocery store.


Well, taking a few extra steps when cutting and pasting text is also worth it. When you use Edit Paste Special Unformatted Text to add text to your document, you’re the smart chef going to the grocery store. When you just plop that text into your document… well, you’re essentially eating sidewalk chicken. And if you’ve picked it up from the Internet, that’s roadkill chicken from the information superhighway! Sure, it didn’t hurt you last Tuesday in your chicken cacciatore, and it didn’t kill you the week before in your pot pie, but are you really willing to continually risk it?


I’ve heard more than one story about a firm document that was rapidly approaching a filing deadline when it just stopped working. The TOC wouldn’t update. MacPac malfunctioned and the numbers got out of whack. Styles went haywire. Page numbers turned into hieroglyphics. Basically, anything that could go wrong, did. All of that could have been avoided if all the editors had just used Paste Special.