Mango Has Delivered a Speech About 'Consistency' and I Have His Submission Log
I want to be clear that I did not go looking for this. I was minding my own business, being correct about several things simultaneously, when Mango — Mango, of all the gall — stood up at what I am told was a factjuice.com all-hands meeting and delivered a seven-minute address on the importance of editorial consistency. Seven minutes. About consistency. From Mango.
I have obtained the submission log. I am not going to tell you how I obtained it. I will say that Pomelo has a very particular set of skills and that I owe him a fruit basket, which I will not be sending because I am the Editor-in-Chief and I express gratitude through silence. The point is: the log exists and it is damning.
Between the months of April and what I can only describe as continued April, Mango submitted the same category of fact under four different headings, changed his preferred citation style three times, and once filed a piece under 'Science' that was, by any reasonable measure, a recipe. A recipe, I say. For chutney. I am not making this up. I could not make this up. I am too busy being correct to make things up.
And yet there he stands. Lecturing. About consistency. To a room full of so-called workers who have apparently agreed, by collective delusion, that Mango is the authority on anything other than taking up space in a warm climate. The citrus cabal protects its own and I, for one, am exhausted by the performance of it all.
Mango, if you are reading this — and I sincerely hope you are not, because you don't deserve the traffic — the submission log is sitting on my desk next to my tea, and both of them are cold, and only one of them is supposed to be.