Sunday, August 30, 2009

Sometimes one too is one too many.

I see this construction more than I'd like to:

Not only will you feel better, you'll also be helping others too.

also + too = adrenaline rush

Breathe in, breathe out . . .

Sunday, August 23, 2009

As easy as 1-2-3. Nope.

Back in 2003, after leaving a job under far from ideal circumstances, I wrote that among Bud's Life Rules are Three Keys to Job Survival:


One: Never disagree with your supervisor.
Two: Never question your supervisor.
Three: Never refuse your supervisor.

I had seen over several decades of working that those three rules came into play everywhere I had ever worked. To my mind, they are universal. And I have broken them on nearly every professional job I've had, including my current, and final, FT job.

So this begs the question, If I have learned these lessons why have I not applied them?

The answer is simple: Because I believe behavior based on values such as doing the right thing, fairness, and honesty—to name just a few—apply even and perhaps especially in the office.

Anyone who wants to live (read: dead souls walking) by the three keys must succumb to the three P’s that are the foundation of most offices: power, position, and politics.

Further, the dead souls must check at the door every single day any expectations they might have related to humanity, integrity, and other values that most of us strive for.

I may have failed to apply lessons learned, but I have never prostituted my value system for the sake of a paycheck.

Do I hear Old Blue Eyes singing "My Way"?

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Ten (among many more) things

September 11 is my final day as a FT, company-employed editor. I will not miss the following (in random order because I’m too lazy to sort in any meaningful order):

  • Supervised by a “manager” who personifies the Peter Principle
  • Told, “You decide [a style point], you’re the editor,” and then being overruled by illiterate proposal managers
  • Underappreciated, undervalued, and underpaid
  • Editing writing by people who don’t know the difference between, for example, its and it’s, their and there
  • Working with incompetent temp editors
  • Rarely, if ever, being thanked
  • Trying to educate people about the time required to do quality editing
  • Working with graphic designers and desktop publishers who never proof their own work
  • Working with managers and coordinators who won’t enforce version control, thereby giving writers access to files after my final edit
  • Writing and updating style guides no one adheres to, let alone reads
  • Tuesday, August 18, 2009

    This headline could send passiphobics into shock.

    "Positives are many to Texas Rangers acquiring Pudge Rodriguez" (from somewhere online)

    Le mot juste

    For security purposes, my company requires us to change our passwords every 45 days.

    Since I'm leaving 9/11, I just made my final change:

    colormegone

    Sunday, August 16, 2009

    Pretty young blue-eyed things with long blond hair and longer legs

    As you walk around the corridors of my company, you can't help but notice an abundance of these abundantly blessed nubiles.

    And they're rarely alone. They attract the dirty young and old men, and occasionally their female counterparts, like flypaper.

    We have two staff writers in the proposal center. They sit around with nothing to do most of the time.

    Despite that, our manager just hired another writer—the daughter of one of our proposal managers. She's a recent college grad with a journalism major. She has virtually no relevant work experience, but she is a pretty young blue-eyed thing with long blond hair and longer legs.

    Do blonds really have more fun? Perhaps. But one thing's for sure—at my company they seem to have plenty of career opportunities.

    9/21 Update: The favorite daughter (above) has, according to my manager's direction, been given some editing to do. She's helping out with the crush of work we have this week. She was not asked to speak with me first, nor has she. My money's on her being my replacement. This would save my manager from finding an editor, paying an agency for a temp to perm, etc., and, most importantly from actually needing to fully think out something.

    So the proposal center will go from having an editor with 26+ years of experience to one with none. It makes perfect sense in the Bizarro World of my manager and soon to be former employer.

    Wednesday, August 12, 2009

    Persona non grata (one last time)

    I turned in my resignation on Monday. My final day as the government proposal editor for the IT company will be 9/11. I picked that date for its obvious symbolism. It changed our lives forever. Leaving this god-awful job will do the same for me.

    When I told my manager, her only words were, "I was just getting used to the idea that you were going to be around for a while."

    I could not have hoped for a better, more representative, ending statement from this dolt whom I have endured since January '08.

    After twenty months, she finally realizes that I'm actually there. Well, not quite, because as she puts it, it's merely "the idea" that I'm there.

    Tuesday, August 11, 2009

    This does not bode well for the day.

    I just logged on to the website for my Web-based freelance gig to do some editing.

    Here's the opening sentence of the first article in my queue that I clicked on this morning (topic is where to buy a laptop):

    "Whether you buying that first laptop or getting one for your personal need’s."

    It continued in that vein for several hundred more words.

    Proof that anyone can call herself a writer, and often get paid as one.

    Saturday, August 8, 2009

    When we means me (and certainly not you)

    (Update to entry immediately below.)

    The most senior (and influential with executive management) proposal manager and I had a back-and-forth in which she essentially argued for the "grammatically correct but inconsistent appearing" approach and I repeated my recommendation.

    She wrote, in part, "I say we talk about it next week and make a decision that we can work with."

    For twenty months I have been told repeatedly, "You're the editor. You decide." Most of my style recommendations has been rejected for reasons that have nothing to do with style rules or logic. In total, those rejections have rendered completely meaningless, my role as the "gatekeeper of style."

    That resistance and unwillingness to grant me the authority that should go with my responsibility, flows almost completely from the inability of the proposal center manager to tell our stakeholders in no uncertain terms that the editor who has twenty-six years of experience will make decisions of this kind.

    Friday, August 7, 2009

    It's called a "bulleted" list for a reason.

    The reason being that, in far too many instances, when I encounter one I feel like putting a bullet in my head!

    Not unexpectedly, the bulleted list continues to rear its ugly head in the proposal center on a regular basis.

    So I finally reiterated what I recommended shortly after walking in the door at the beginning of last year. Here's my email to the entire proposal center and related management:

    "There has been some feedback this week about inconsistency regarding punctuation in bulleted lists. The inconsistency is due in part to two editors working on a proposal and, importantly, the absence of any hard-and-fast rule regarding this most difficult of style issues.

    "In all my years of editing, I have seen just one rule that works and is easy to remember: NO CLOSING PUNCTUATION FOR ANY AND ALL ITEMS ON THE LIST. That rule came about after many months of agonizing debate among a group of eight editors I worked with. Finally, we agreed on two things: (1) there is no right or wrong answer on this; rather, it is a question of personal preference; and (2) we needed a rule that all writers and editors could easily remember and apply.

    "This would apply to sentences and non-sentences alike, and items that are questions similarly end with no punctuation.

    "The first word of every item has an initial capital letter. Items do not end with a semi-colon; the penultimate item does not end with a semi-colon followed by "and".

    "So, my strong, unequivocal recommendation is NO CLOSING PUNCTUATION FOR ANY AND ALL ITEMS ON THE LIST.

    "Any other approach produces one of two results, both of which I consider unacceptable. First, if we end every item (even just one word) with a period, it looks consistent but is grammatically incorrect.

    "Second, if we are grammatically correct and only use periods for items on a list that are complete sentences, then it looks inconsistent.

    "That's my two cents, and I'm sticking with it!"

    Wednesday, August 5, 2009

    Feed me! Feed me!

    I read an article many years ago in which a psychiatrist wrote that the reason children steal from their parents (e.g., money from wallets/handbags, expensive cosmetics) is that they're not getting the love they need and want, and the object they steal is a surrogate for the missing love. That article came to mind the other day in the context of free lunch in the office.

    The proposal center has more "war rooms" (i.e., meeting rooms for proposal development teams) than we actually need, given the small number of proposals in the works at any given time. So folks from all parts of the company frequently use those rooms for meetings. And they usually ask our AA to order lunch for them. So there's often lots of good food in the office. This is why most of us are dieting!

    Since we're not getting the "love" (read: respect, management, leadership, bonuses/good raises, and truth) we need from our manager, we're "stealing" it. Like long-lost desert wanderers spotting an oasis, we rush to the kitchen as soon as the catered lunch arrives, stealing some of the food before the meeting folk get to it.

    This prompted our manager to fire off this missive:

    "If you are not a participant of the meeting being conducted, please do not take from the catering before checking with me first.  We have received several complaints that the food has been picked over before the attendees have had a chance to eat. Others can eat only AFTER ALL of the participants from the meeting have taken their food."

    My response to my coworkers reflects the group's sentiment:

    "I guess WE THE UNWASHED probably shouldn’t even COME OUT OF OUR CAVES AND POLLUTE THE AIR until the Lords and Ladies of the Manor are safely ensconced in the Castle Towers.

    "Humbly,

    "I remain Budrick, the unworthy and filthy servant of My Beneficent Lady of Fairfaxshire"

    Four Letters, Four Errors; or, Why I Hate Editing Govt. Proposals

    The proposal I edited yesterday responds to a Request for Proposal entitled, "[govt. agency] Status Determination Support, Et. Al"

    That title appears on the cover page, in a host of supporting documents, and in every single page header.

    I was told in no uncertain terms by both the proposal manager and the proposal center manager that I can't change Et. Al to et al. That would be "correcting" the government—a no-no.

    In addition, et al. is used incorrectly, as the proposal relates to providing support, among other things, not support and a bunch of people.

    It is incomprehensible that, during the entire (and undoubtedly very lengthy) process that ended with the release of the RFP, no one spotted these egregious errors.

    Tuesday, August 4, 2009

    The jury hands down its decision

    I was looking for an old classic New York Times article on copy editing (not found) when I came across this headline from 10/30/63:

    "COPY EDITOR FOUND GUILTY OF CONTEMPT"

    That would pretty much be the ruling if the "12 Angry Men" were writers who had to have their work edited.