Read Rage

At the Buddhist meditation center in Santa Fe, every week we talk about the problems of life and the remedies that Buddhism offers for those problems. One week we were talking about the problems of impatience and anger. One of the people in my small group said, "Well, impatience is why people get road rage."

I said that I never really get road rage. For most of my life, I didn't have a car. Now, I do, but I live in a small town where traffic is never really a problem. So, anger at my fellow drivers has never really been an issue for me. However, I do experience another kind of anger:

Read rage.

Read rage occurs when I'm grading a set of papers and I come across the same mistake seventeen times in two paragraphs. My colleagues outside my office will hear me muttering and then, on the eighteenth occasion of the mistake, start yelling at the computer screen.

They just shake their heads and say, "He has the read rage."  Read rage affects English teachers, instructors, and professors of all types: from Mrs. Jones in Grade 5 to, presumably, professors at Harvard.

Nobody in English escapes read rage. Tragically, the condition doesn't respond to medication or surgery.

My first bout of read rage happened right after college, when I was a copy editor at W.B. Saunders. In the days before computers, I edited medical articles using pen and paper. Once, I had edited an article and had come to the reference list. I looked at the list with a sinking heart. There were two hundred items, and they were in the wrong style. I would have to re-do the entire list. I think my hands shook I was so pissed. I hoped the doctor who wrote the article would get sued for malpractice.

Read rage.