A kind reader working on a translation alerted me to a confusing word in the page on this web site “Untitled 1978 (Very) Short Story by Philip K. Dick” in the fourth paragraph of the article: “Living alone year after year in a rented room, apying off the I.R.S. and my endless child support, waiting vainly for the right girl, the girl who, when she finally showed up, mearly laughed at me.” The typo is in a Red font for emphasis.

By looking at the context, I wasn’t able to decipher what the word should be. I searched the older versions of this page in both the copy of the entire site that was passed to me, and in the Wayback Machine (as I prefer to call it) or Internet Archive. The typo seems to have existed since the content was first added to the site. So I contacted Patrick Clark, who had originally provided the story, and he was kind enough to go back and check the original.

He found that yes that was a typo; it should read paying and not apying. And while checking on this, he found another typo in the first sentence of the story: “In the back of the bus an old wino in tattered clothing sat hunched over, holding a wine bottle of ill-concealed in a brown paper bag.” Again, the typo is in a Red font for emphasis. The of needed to be removed.

I have fixed both typos in the version on the web site. Now you can enjoy this story as Philip K. Dick intended (as the marketing people would say). I would like to thank both the reader who pointed out the first typo to me and to Patrick Clark for helping me get to the bottom of these textual mistakes.