Diary of a report writer and his big break into bad business
- Reference: 1616763727
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/03/26/something_for_the_weekend_/
- Source link:
Friday
[1]
Utter bastard.
For the second time this week I have had to work overnight for this arsehole to get his job done. As directed, I have taken great care to replace the concise and correct use of English in my original report with an idiomatic minestrone of convoluted expressions. The difference is dramatic. My original was a business-casual kind of document. It’s now three pages longer and reads like the transcript of a teenager on TikTok whining inarticulately between tokes on his inhaler.
[2]
I send it off at dawn. At lunchtime, tit-face comes back by email to demand that I rewrite it again before the end of the day (because I’ve "done it wrong") otherwise they won’t pay. By now I’m royally fed up with this wanker’s pissy antics at his shit-for-brains company full of turds.
I type the aforementioned sentence into my email reply but have a change of heart. I delete the insult and replace it with a friendly acknowledgement that I do not expect be paid for the work, and request that the company should therefore not share or publish the report – internally or externally, at all, in the slightest, under any circumstances whatsoever – and that my Word files should be destroyed immediately.
After hitting the Send button, I silence my phone and go watch some Mr Robot season 4 for the rest of the afternoon.
I check my phone at 5:00 PM. I have received seven messages from a completely different person at the tosser’s company. She requests politely, if increasingly pleadingly from one email to the next, whether I would mind doing one last rewrite and send it in.
I fish out my original report from earlier this week, change the version number at the end of the filename, and email it across to her. Within minutes, a reply comes back:
"Thanks. Great work. Send in your invoice."
Thursday
He’s an idiot.
He might be the boss of me for the moment but I’m curious to know why a world-renowned organisation would have chosen such a deadhead to commission and edit reports. After radio silence throughout yesterday afternoon all the way up to 10:00 AM today, he now emails me to rant about how late things are running.
He says my work does not conform to their standards with respect to use of terminology. I ask for examples of what I have written incorrectly. Much later, in the afternoon, I receive a copy of my Word file – saved as a ‘.docx’ – into which someone has inserted a few comments typed in red. No, not Track Changes, just red text typed directly into my report, thereby messing up the layout.
One of the red comments complains that the layout is messed up. Other comments seem to take exception to my lack of commas and predilection for active verbs. My area references measured in square kilometres have been converted to "km2". In one case, the person who marked up the corrections has struck through the words "a quarter" under a chart summary and replaced it with "four times less".
I consult the document properties to see who wrote this foolishness, but my own name is still there from the original saved version. Annoyingly, the time stamp shows that it was edited and saved yesterday – possibly in a different time zone.
Wednesday
A difficult man.
Having worked all night on his urgent report, I submit it at 8:00 AM as requested. I then down a large coffee and hit the sofa for a quick nap so I can be up again an hour later to handle any queries.
'No' does not mean 'yes'... unless you are a scriptwriter for software user interfaces [3]READ MORE
He eventually acknowledges receipt at noon and sets up an immediate Teams. He declares, a bit pompously in my opinion, that he hasn’t been able to open my work because it’s in "the wrong version of Word". Would I send it again please? So I ask which version he wants. "The right version," he snaps back, like a smart-arse, and reminds me that we have now wasted half a day – when in fact we haven't, he has.
I save my documents to 20th century ".doc" format, fix the resulting reflow problems and resubmit the files within half an hour. Then I go to bed.
Mid-afternoon my phone is chiming with a DM. Apparently my report has been "rejected by the client" and it will need to be redone. Client? What client? I request another Teams meeting for clarification but he tells me he can only do email from now on. Bleary eyed, I slump in front of my computer, awaiting further instructions for the rewrite. None arrive.
Tuesday
A jolly busy fellow, I think.
We ping-ponged emails back and forth yesterday afternoon and evening and throughout this morning, trying to agree on a mutually convenient time slot for the Teams meeting. When I say "mutually convenient time slot", I mean he doesn’t have one. Or he does but then he has to change it – several times. It’s only natural that such a fine fellow would be in demand, of course.
It’s lunchtime when we finally get to talk. That is, when he gets to talk. He talks at me for a full hour, which is amazing since my usual vidconf chats these days never take longer than 10 minutes. Clearly this is a man in command! I feel so enthused! I barely even glance at my wristwatch while he talks. Just three or four times, that’s all. By the end, everything seems clear enough: a summary report, charts, infographics, that sort of thing.
Then he says "oh yes, I forgot" and tells me the deadline is first thing tomorrow morning.
That gives me 20 hours to do the job. In terms of raw working hours it’s not impossible, I suppose, but I had planned on sleeping for eight of them. It occurs to me what a shame it was that he’d not been able to schedule this discussion any earlier or mention it in the email, but I prefer to say nothing. He’s the pro, after all!
The money is a bit disappointing to be honest: just basic rate. But I don’t mind. This will be my foot in the door to greater things, working with top people for a top organisation!
I ask if he has a tone of voice or style guide that I should conform to; any special terms or expressions that I should use; US or UK spelling; and so on. He waves it all away – clearly a man of power and urgency! – and tells me I should just get on with it as I see fit.
I also ask how he wants the report materials delivered: PDF? HTML? He says "Word". Any particular version, I ask. The file format has subtly changed over the years and can play havoc with complex page layouts. "Just Word", he says.
Monday
What a top guy!
Great news! I’ve been contacted by an exec at a potential new client, out of the blue. I can’t tell you how much I'm looking forward to working for him. He really sounds the business!
OK so the email doesn’t mention money but, hey, it’s a big organisation that declared vast profits last year – I’m sure paying the going rate is not going to be a problem. The exec who wrote me the email comes across as articulate, friendly and professional, and I pride myself on being an excellent judge of character.
He’s asked for a quick chat over Teams "ASAP"! Definitely the business! At last I get to work with people who know what they’re doing and know what they want. Great things will come from this, mark my words. I’m definitely not going to regret this!
[4]Youtube Video
[5]
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling tech journalism, training and digital publishing. This week he has been a writer of fiction. Any resemblance to living persons blah blah blah. He says it all happened in the past anyway. But, of course, when else could it have happened? More at [6]Autosave is for Wimps and [7]@alidabbs .
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The cost of education
I’m definitely not going to regret this!
Lesson learned: I will regret this and I should have known. Next time, I will get it right.
Next time: I’m definitely not going to regret this! ... etc.
Yes, education should have done the job. We always think to be smart when we've learned something from experience, but when money comes into play, we are stupid, every time. Cheers, have one to wash it down to be prepared for the next round of regrets.
Re: The cost of education
Ah, now I am Cynical. I was in fact informed of this at the age of 18, by a mid-40s middle-manager, in a tone of mixed exasperation and respect. I've had years of real-life lessons since then.
These days, the barest sniff of an awkward client has me thinking "I know I'm going to regret this, but forward I must go. I wonder exactly how I'm going to regret it this time."
Formats and reflow!
I've just finished what started off as a query on our history group website and turned into a 13 page article. It's amazing how most images start in the bottom half of a page. A few changes of text edge them closer and closer to the bottom of a page until one then falls off, leaving a big gap and cascading the consequences until the last image on the last page falls off onto a new page all of its own separated from the paragraph that describes ant and absolutely has to be on the same page.
From the depths of my own life, from a time at which I was a project manager... the program manager had a word document he wanted me to 'just tidy up a bit'. It was about a thousand pages long, full of rather dense technical prose, supporting diagrams, plans, examples; you know the kind of thing.
Oh, and there were about thirty of it. One for each site where we were doing the essentially similar work - that is, similar in a 'replace this group of circuits with that group of circuits' but each one had different details, dates, and so on, as might be expected.
And every single never to be sufficiently damned page had every paragraph formatted differently, and every format was with character formats... whoever wrote them had obviously never heard of styles.
It is not a time I remember with delight - though I do recall that when we got down to actually doing the job, we had a single instance of unplanned downtime across the whole country, caused because someone had threaded a cable in such a way that we could not remove the hardware without disconnecting it - so thirty seconds or so.
and every format was with character formats
Gosh, it's been a while since I've had any painful flashbacks; thanks a lot (I don't think!) for that one.
There is a wall between now and the times before 2020 that may never be breached. I'm sure of it. Just to be safe, never mention styles, master documents and heading numbering again. Please?
> Formats and reflow!
Back in Word 2010 and earlier days, another problem was when you needed to assemble a document using contributions from different authors and, despite sending them a style template, someone always managed to change one of the underlying styles. And then, Word will decide that the style definitions in the 10 lines you are importing must take precedence over the 200 pages you already have. Typically the result is that every other heading is courier, or the headers and footers have gone awol.
The problem got so bad that I resorted to writing a VBA macro to give unique names to each author's style names (by prefixing their initials) so that they couldn't overwrite each other.
A (La)TeX user writes:
Look, be fair, MS Word is only about 35 years old.
I'm sure you Word guys will get your formatting and float placement right sometime in the next few decades. How hard can it be, right?
Re: A (La)TeX user writes:
How hard can it be,...
Well, probably NP-hard. If they actually get formatting right in word, then I'm inclined to believe that P = NP.
Re: A (La)TeX user writes:
And most Word users don't know about Paragraph and Page styles.
Re: A (La)TeX user writes:
There is something lacking in the Word training that users seem to receive (if they have even had Word training). I suspect a basic version of Word without styles, limited fonts unless expressly installed, easy access and editing of formatting codes and a simpler interface would be a better product for the majority (hmm, I think I've just described Wordperfect for DOS) .
Word tries to do too much some of which is better suited to DTP software and hides too much from the unwary.
predilection for active verbs.
You MONSTER, Mr Dabbs!!!
BTW is this the Tenet version of your article?
Re: predilection for active verbs.
Or "Memento," Nolan's better work.
Re: predilection for active verbs.
Nope. This is the "Betrayal" version. Which raises the question: which actor should portray Dabbsy in the movie adaptation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betrayal_(play)
Re: predilection for active verbs.
Look at the byline pic. Daniel Craig is the only option!
Re: is this the Telnet version of your article?
One would hope, these days, that it's the *ssh* version :-)
Ha!
Ha!
Oh, I'm glad it's not me.
(Should I delete the comma?)
Re: Ha!
Should I delete the comma?
Yes, but only to replace it with a semi - colon. :)
Is this how Adrian Mole ended up?
I hate Adobe, but...
I would never submit a Word document. Between Micro$oft and the idiocracy, Word is a nightmare. PDF is the way to go. It doesn't get red-flagged by e-mail servers (well, not so much) and is more proof against diddling. Plus, there are plenty of read-only apps that can view it.
Mentioned Before...
At the company I worked for, one of my roles involved writing manufacturing formulas (procedures) for the factories. These were procedures which I had developed or modified, and in the vast majority of cases simply involved the editing of an existing document to produce a different end product - like, instead of 'add A to B, then mix for 5 minutes on speed setting 5', it was changed to 'add X to Y, then mix for 5 minutes on speed setting 5'.
In theory, that ought not to cause any problems, right? No chance.
Every formula had to be signed by the author (me, in this case), checked/signed by a colleague, checked/signed by my manager (you can see where this is heading), checked/signed by the manager of the department who'd be making it, and - the big one - signed off by Quality Control (aka the QC Manager, who spent 98% of his time in meetings). In latter years, they made it even more fun by requiring it be checked by 'the team who would be making it' (aka the shop floor staff).
My manager was a big enough a'hole to flag up needless changes, but these were nothing compared with the QC manager. He would write cryptic notes in red ink along the lines of 'Have a think about this' or just '!!!'. No suggestion of what to write instead.
I used to have real head-to-heads with him, asking why it was a problem if we were using the exact same terminology in dozens of other formulas. Several times - with him being out of his office when I tried to get some guidance of what would buy his signature for something the customer was demanding we produce, and which was scheduled for a manufacturing slot in two days' time - I left a note saying 'Look. Just tell me what you want it to say and I'll write it'.
If that wasn't depressing enough, each rewrite meant having to get all the other signatures again - and that wasn't just a formality, since they'd go through the entire checking procedure once more. Inevitably, they'd 'pick up' something they hadn't seen previously (aka they were in a bad mood this time around because one of the kids was off school sick and they'd got to leave early). Then they'd get to the substantial change the QC nutjob had insisted on and disagree. Then they'd demand a meeting to 'discuss it'.
If I'd have stayed, I'd be dead by now.
Many Years Ago...
I had a boss that always wanted changes, every single time a document was submitted.
Things that she'd "passed" three times would be wrong the fourth time and so on.
In the end we told her we wouldn't accept changes after the third submission, which she reluctantly agreed to, and we started deliberately introducing minor, but obvious, errors into the original document. She'd be happy to find something wrong and would leave all the important stuff alone.
Re: Many Years Ago...
My usual solution was to deliberately insert a split infinitive into my text (see what I did there?)
Then we'd bat it to-and-fro a few times, with me giving chapter and verse on "The King's English" by Fowler and why English-English permits if not exactly encourages this grammatical construct.
They soon give up.
A Simple Observation...
This article beautifully reveals what happens when style is forced to have precedence over substance.
``In one case, the person who marked up the corrections has struck through the words `a quarter' under a chart summary and replaced it with `four times less'.''
I see and hear this all the damned time. Apparently, it's because "fractions are hard".
Amazing
Having done freelance stuff, I felt this piece in the parts of my soul not yet killed by these interactions. Nicely written!
It reminds me, also, of the importance of the lessons imparted [1]here
(same link here, just not hyperlinked)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U