meanwhile

Early last December we got a submission that we had to send back for further edits; my colleague said "here are the things that will need to be changed to make this publication accessible," and I said "also I have marked up everything in here that does not comply with our style guide." The PDF had 240 comments in it.

Last week we got it back from where it had apparently been sitting in someone's email (either they never sent it or the project manager never got it) since late last December. They'd made all (or possibly all but one) of the accessibility changes and, at first glance, not made the style guide changes. When the PM queried, they said they had so done the text edits, what was I talking about, could I please mark in the ones I thought they hadn't done; so I opened the last-December file on my right screen and the last-week file on my left screen and clicked through all 240 comments one at a time, re-marking them in the new file as necessary.

When I was through there were like 97 comments in the new file, so fair enough, they had apparently done as much as 60% of the text edits, but in my defense there was no rhyme or reason to which ones they'd done and which ones they hadn't done, and they hadn't done any on the first three pages of the thing, so I maintain my first impression was fairly accurate. Sent that back.

Today the PM reported that the authors said these comments were new, that is, not present in last December's markup.

Friends, the way my blood boiled. My own boss said that was obviously ridiculous because it's not that hard to see that they missed things, but of course I'm not worried that he thinks I'm half-assing my work; I'm mad that the PM, our customer, may think I'm half-assing when it is in fact Not Me Who Is Half-Assing Anything. (And also a little mad that when this thing is done it's going to have our logo on it but still be ugly as fuck. I don't know why we haven't been allowed to shove it into our design template but only to edit the text—or apparently to call for edits to the text and have those calls ignored.) I'm a goddamn professional is all I'm saying, and if we put this sucker in our design template, we'd get it right the first time and not have to do three rounds of edits and no you're still not understanding the points any of us are making.

Sigh.

Meanwhile, my mother called me today—Wednesday—to let me know that if I was planning to call her tomorrow for Mother's Day, she's going to have company between the hours of X and Y, and the fact that tomorrow is Thursday and Mother's Day is Sunday may or may not even have registered with her? Hard to know. As it happens I'm busy almost all day Sunday myself, so I might not have called her anyway, our family never having been too fussed about Mother's Day one way or the other, but now that she's brought it up I expect I have to.

Sigh.

Also, last night the prince, who is six, made himself cry asking about my dad.

HIM: Did your dad pass away?
ME: Yes, he did.
HIM: Were you sad?
ME: Yes, I was very sad.
HIM: How much did you cry?
ME: A lot.
HIM: How much did your mom cry?
ME: Probably even more than I did.
HIM: [sobbing]

🙄

On the up side, we bought the last available instance of the car we wanted in the (extremely generously defined) metro area and possibly on the entire eastern seaboard. So that's fun.