In my job, I work with a great many details. So much so that oftentimes, the most mundane of these details slips through the cracks. I’ll admit this - I have a tendency to miss some of the small issues. These are issues that don’t actually affect the big picture, but do denigrate the professionalism of the project when you notice something stupid like a typo.
So I have this boss. He’s the big bossman around the office. In fact, so much so that he lives halfway across the nation but still rules my team with an iron fist. Pretty much everything we do has to go through him before it goes to a client. In the last month, I’ve made stupid mistakes in front of him. Like an improper column heading in a spreadsheet. Or a footnote that should be minorly changed. Well, this guy HATES these mistakes and I keep making them. Over and over again. In fact, I was on the phone with him tonight and there was one more improper column heading and he chided me for missing these details.
And then, what do I do less than 10 minutes later? I fuck up again. What in the holy hell is wrong with me? To be fair, it’s a mistake that anyone can make. It’s easy to make, but complicated enough that I can’t explain it to him. Here’s the abridged version for those in the know: I saved a file that I opened as an attachment from an email. It saved in my temp folder. I meant to save it elsewhere. I made revisions and saved it again and sent it out from the wrong folder (i.e. the original and not the temp) to bossman. I checked it, but when I opened it up from the email, it automatically opens …drumroll … the TEMP folder version! So as far as I can see, I’m sending out the edited version when I am not.
Oh boy did he notice it. I apologized and had to send it twice more before I figured it all out. GODDAMMIT! What kinda jackass am I anyway?
In summary: I’m a moron who makes stupid little mistakes that always get noticed while they never notice the huge things that I always get right. And I can’t even come up with a way to make this post interesting to anybody but me.
If you have read this far … you’ve likely found some tiny mistake that I mistakenly passed over in the above text.
I feel your pain. I also have one of those bosses who seems to notice every mistake I make, whether it’s a big screw-up or a tiny punctuation mistake. And he’s not exactly gentle about correcting my errors. But on the rare occasions when he asks me to proofread his stuff, I can usually find some typos. Nobody’s perfect, including your But he’s not the one submitting his work to your for your approval. If that were the case, I bet you could find flaws in his work, too, because everyone makes mistakes, big and little.
Sounds like your boss is one of those attention-to-detail people. You’re probably more of a big-picture person. Do you happen to work with any other attention-to-detail folks, like someone who you could have take a glance at your spreadsheets and reports, and point out any glaring errors that your boss is sure to twig on?
If you are not the kind of person who is focused on detail, or you don’t have the kind of job where you can CYA by catching your own mistakes before you are beat over the head with them, it really sounds like you need a new line of work.
I handle millions and millions of dollars in transactions every year, but there’s no way on God’s green earth could do that super precise data monkey work for a living, esp with a looming “checker” over my shoulder. I’m not the world’s best typist. I’d go insane inside a week. Get a new job. This one will crush your spirit.
I’m normally a really detailed person, but to be completely honest and a little bit on the egotistical side … I’m bored. After four years of doing this job, I don’t find the slightest bit of a challenge. Therefore, I pay less and less attention to the details because they’ve gotten so mundane that I can’t keep my mind on them. Usually I just want to get the files out the door at this point. Even when I look closely at them, I still gloss over the column header - as it’s part of a template, I read it as “correct”, not noticing that it might not be relevant to the matter at hand.
My problem is that they expect so much more from me than anyone else on the team. I try to get my stuff proofread by another set of eyes along the way, but oftentimes I can’t find anyone. Everyone else on the team gets their stuff checked and re-checked but I don’t - they send me the “get it done quick” jobs that have to be out the door today. In my time frame, I have to rush through it (which is usually not an issue) but then I don’t have the time to find someone else to look it over, unfortunately. They say “that’s okay, just get it out” and look what happens.
Anybody else makes a mundane mistake, not a big deal. When I do it, it’s a freakin’ production. This boss once called me from Florida, an hour before a potential business presentation, to point out a summing mistake I’d made in a table. A table HE had proofread and okayed. He called me not to ask if I was sure, but simply to let me know I fucked up. We got the client to sign a deal, by the way.
But I definitely DO need to find a new job. I’ve hit the proverbial glass ceiling at this company, anyway. I can only chase that carrot so long. Thanks for the support, guys!
