Sounds like masochism given the context, but I’ve been dabbling in medical writing/editing myself and want to get more ginormous-document experience. Tranquilis, may I email you a few questions?
Wow, honestly I wasn’t expecting your answer. Color me impressed. This isn’t saying that a degree gives one the intelligence to do your job and those with degrees are smarter. Usually companies have major sticks up their asses about degrees and oftentimes they don’t even give people without them a chance.
You’re obviously very smart and good at what you do, and going out on a limb here, but I don’t think you’ve missed out on much by not finishing yours.
Absolutely - be my guest.
I’m going to need to nail down a degree one of these days, DudleyG, but it’s not critical yet. I’m not going to deny that I’ve been lucky, but I’ve capitalized on that luck by busting my ass. I’m so deeply penetrated into my pay band that they have a hard time justifying raises. So, instead, my bonuses average around 10% of my yearly base pay. Mind you, in this group, that’s probably not an uncommon figure. If Study Delivery didn’t keep shafting us like this, we’d not be pulling down numbers quite that large, but I’d have a life, and my children wouldn’t be surprised to see me at home. :mad: I can name some Medical Communications types who are going to be seeing a dip in their bonus levels…
Oh, and my hands hurt. Some of these pages have so many links they’re more blue than black. Enough finicky linking like that, and you start to really get a cramp… Yeah, I’m still at work.
Why in the name of all that’s holy/rational does a drug that doesn’t work need a 68,000 page document to explain why it doesn’t work? My sympathies to anyone who puts in vast amounts of work that comes to nothing but the uber-Pitting should go to whatever concantenation of evil led to the need for 68,000 pages to say “it don’t work.”
All science included in the study needs to be reported:
- To prove we aren’t hiding anything. 2) Humans were tested - the Agency really wants to be sure nothing went unnoticed. 3) The devil is in the details - in this case, well over 100 megabytes of details. Cause and causality are very often extremely subtle, especially when testing in humans. This is why “computer model” testing is a fantasy - ain’t no computer anywhere so complex and subtle as real-life biology. 4) Because, among other things, the agency is amassing a pool of detailed knowledge in this particular area of human medical study. 5) Because it’s science, and science doesn’t advance unless information is shared. 6) It’s the rules - do a study, the agency gets the report - All of it - or a damned good reason why they didn’t get the report.
Or, to cut to the chase: Had the drug worked, the report would still have been 68 k-pages. Success or failure, the report is the same size. That’s simply how the study was designed. The problem is, as a failure, it’s unstaffed. All Study Delivery resources that were assigned to this project are now assigned to projects that are moving forward. I have to basically drag the various bodies back, kicking and screaming, to clean up the messes they left - they want, just like I want, to be doing work that’s moving forward. But I can’t move on until this bugger is put to bed, so they will, by God, fix their messes. Especially since their messes have cost me so much re-work. I’m still in the office.
:mad:
68 Kilopages? Damn my eyes start to water after about 10 pages.
Color me impressed.
I do a similar job on a smaller scale (a couple of modules of the ectd, not the whole damn thing) and at this point I think my colleagues and I are keeping tally sheets of how often we ask if we can even pilot XML only to get blown off by management. It’s kind of getting funny.
But not.
Which is a shame, because I think acrobat is absolutely not designed to be used the way we have to. Especially since in the version we just got rolled up to (without being asked by IT, just… ugh) I don’t seem to have any keyboard shortcuts to move between the gorram hand tool and the link tool, which was the only salvation for my sanity in previous versions. And there are always bizarre incompatibilities between acrobat and the document management system when there’s a version change.
Hope your bookmarks and links get under control soon. Bleh.
They’re still there, they’ve just been turned off by default. If you want 'em back, choose Edit > Preferences > General, and then select the Use Single-Key Accelerators To Access Tools option.
I hate it when they do stuff like that. Why on earth would you switch off a major area of the program’s interface? Rrrrgh.
Out of sheer awe, could you tell me in just what format these 68,000 pages are to be published? I assume it won’t be the New England Journal of Medicine.
Ok, that just made me need a tranquilizer by proxy. Sheesh. I wish we had a sympathy smiley.
Up into this thread, I was considering technical writing as a possible career move.
68 thousand pages…Typos…Missing documentation…Mis-labeled tables…problems don’t show up until a LOT of work has already been done…pagination changes…entire content shifts…thousands of links and bookmarks are thrown off…lost. Gone. Wasted. Thrown out the window… Shot to shit.
I’m going to go console myself with a nice, easy word search.
Heh!
Yeah, I hear ya. We actualy have projects up and running, and even in testing. But the testing keeps failing on one requirement or another, and they keep changing the version of the tool we’re testing… So just when it looks like we’re about to get a validated version working, the release number increments, and we wind up back at the drawing board again. Because God forbid that the tool remain substantialy similar to any previous release!
:mad:
We’re making heavy use of the ISI Toolkit, and it helps a LOT in some areas - I’d slit my wrists without the ToC Linker, the Link and Bookmark Attributers, and the Link & Bookmark Auditor. To give an example, Section 11 of this report (Tables, Figures, and Listings Discussed but not Included in Text) is 40 pages long. That’s a 40 page Table of Contents for those of you not ‘in the know.’ And it’s just for one portion of the report - I haven’t even begun to mention the Section 12 Appendices!
It’s published to the agency (FDA in this case), where a FOIA request can get it. The synopsis may never be published in a journal - it hasn’t been as yet - but the synopsis will be eventually posted on the various US States’ sites (I think it’s Maine, among others, that requires such) as well as the synopsis being available on the FDA’s site.
Thanks, lisacurl. Took a couple hours off last night to go see Weird Al Yankovich, before returning to the office to stick my nose to the grindstone once more. That helped a lot.
My albatross is in Quality Control checking right now, to make sure I haven’t missed anything. Meanwhile, the various responsible parties debated how to handle the latest batch of discrepancies. If I get lucky, I may be able to get away with exporting my work and re-importing the links and boookmarks atop a cleaned-up version. That’d be nice. But I ain’t holding my breath.
LunaV, to be fair, what I’m doing isn’t technical writing - not really. My contributers are specialized technical writers - more spcifically, they’re medical writers, or medical communications writers. Of course, they’re the ones screwing me up. So, if you want to bring a little joy to the world, you can still be a technical writer, but just remember my plight, and never do any of this to your publishers!
Oh seriously? That’s great! I could kiss you if you weren’t some sort of deceased mammal. We’ve only had the new version a couple of weeks and I have been fortunate enough to be busy on other projects, but that was going to drive me crazy.
Augh. Anyway. End of a long week. I’ll raise a glass, Tranquilis, to your mental health. Thank goodness indeed for ISI Toolkit. May your albatross go die around someone else’s neck.
Well, the QC checker who’s working on this is out of the office… My last missive IRT discrepancies seems to have vaished into the mist, as I haven’t heard so much as a whisper about how they plan to address the missing docmentation… My boss is still applying pressure, though it’s mostly pro forma - She knows I want this thing gone, but she has to appear to be “be concerned” for political reasons… There ain’t shit I can do to move this forward at this moment, and I’ve caught up on the crisis work that was waiting in the wings…
I’m going home.
Come Monday, I’m likely going to be back up to my ass in aligators again, but there’s nothing I can do to move this forward this weekend. So I’m going to go home and quietly have a mental breakdown for a couple days. I daresay I’ve earned one.
Sixty-eight thousand pages? Damn. Suddenly the legal treatise I’ve been updating doesn’t seem so bad.
Hang in there, Tranquilis.
Wow. I have no idea whether to commiserate or to just point and laugh 
Either would be appropriate, as the mood strikes you.
Horrible headache this AM - Caffeine withdrawal - I’ve been living on coffee to keep awake and alert on this… Seeing as there’s nothing I can do right now, I didn’t have any coffee this AM. Paying for that now… :smack:
Sonova… I’ve been in various forms of technical writing for over 16 years. I’ve had my share of horror stories. Yours beats them all. I’m just gonna sit here and shake my head repeating, “Oh, hell no!” GAH!
Tranquilis, I currently work for an outfit that makes training materials for pharmaceutical types. I’ve seen the sort of reports you’re talking about, and as the monstrosities are dumped on my desk for my perusal (I don’t need to READ them, thank god; we just occasionally get them for reference and can scan them if we feel like it), I have wondered out loud who the hell had the task of putting such things together.
Now that I know, all I can say is…damn. Sorry, friend, and if “Mid-Atlantic” is anywhere in the Roanoke area, feel free to hit me up for a beer and a sympathetic ear.
Jesus Tranq, I wondered why we weren’t “seeing” much of you around the various boards…
Give J & L a hug for me… oh wait, maybe you can’t…