Does such a cat exist?
I don’t think they do but a girl can dream.
My next rant is I just realized I posted my cat woes in the wrong rant thread.
[switches to extra-strength coffee]
That would be delightful! Whoever created this document put content on master pages.This isn’t the first time I found text I couldn’t edit, but it’s always for a different reason. 
One of my most common student mistakes. I really don’t grasp how/why they would do that.
At least it’s easier to fix than the worst one (which I also had to deal with when working with an engineering firm)… setting up each page as a separate text box.
Arrrgh!
For non-designers, text is supposed to flow from one page to the next, so if changes make for an extra line of text, it moves to the next page, then to the next… Now imagine that Ed The Engineer Who Had To Make The Manuals is told to add a line of text. The way Ed had been doing all their manuals he’d add the text, then cut the last line of type, go to the next page and paste it in. Oops, now that page has too much text. cut the last line, and go to the top of the next page… Some of these manuals were close to a hundred pages.
At least he rarely used subheads… because yes, those were separate text boxes too. That each had to get moved when the text moved.
Thank you! I figured it out before I saw your post, but I’ve found some more interesting things there. It’s a good resource.
This just makes me sad. The text flows for a reason! A related story—my former boss, a communications professional, would hit Return in Word docs multiple times to get to a new page. I have very unpleasant memories of editing Word docs.
Oh, lordy. Yes. I loathe and despise Word. Thankfully my current job uses FrameMaker which is far more stable and does what I tell it to do, instead of what it thinks I ought to be doing. That being said, my now (not particularly unlamented) ex-coworker did similar things even though I had set up the tags in FrameMaker to handle pagination automatically. Claimed it was too hard for him to figure out to learn how to use it. Meantime, he thought that styles with names such as “Body space” were perfectly understandable, and yes, he also added multiple returns to create new pages in both Word and FrameMaker.
The rest of the office uses Word. I’ve created a few Word templates for them to use, which I have locked so that they can’t use most of the ribbon to apply formats on the fly. There’ve been a couple of complaints about that, and my response has been, “I can add the format you want as a named style, so you can get the look you want without my unlocking the template, or I can unlock the template so you can format as you please. But if I do that, you get to fix your document if something goes wrong.”
So far, they’ve all chosen to have me add a named style and keep the template locked.
It’s good to have well-trained co-workers. I’ve tried, but mine aren’t very trainable.
I don’t think it’s that they’re well-trained so much as they know I’m not kidding.
Thank you for the explanation, @digs.
Sometimes you wonder how people remember to put their pants on the right way or tie their shoes.
On a positive: We were issued new laptops maybe 6 weeks or so ago? There are ongoing problems- Sharepoint and Adobe still won’t play nice, Sharepoint and IE is a match made in hell; basically, if Sharepoint is involved, it’s messed up.
The much larger problem was frequent disconnects from the main programs we use and from our Cisco Softphones. I’m not talking about being away for ten minutes and it would disconnect. If I worked for even two minutes in another program, boom, black screen / restart. Frustrating if you’re in the middle of a case. If you were on a call and not continuously using the main program, both it and Softphone would disconnect.
I’ve had an open ticket with IT since the second day of having the laptop. It has been “fixed” at least six times.
Thursday, a man from a different IT team messaged me, asking if I was still having issues. Considering that in the couple minute convo, I disconnected, yeah.
Don’t know what he did, but it was fixed! The rest of the day Thursday and Friday was black screen free!
Put his contact information in your Rolodex, quick!
But don’t tell anyone else about him, or he’ll be booked solid next time you really need him.
That is pretty much the definition of well-trained.
Found yet another fuck-up by my no longer missed ex-cow-orker. Said cow-orker didn’t like to use FrameMaker’s cross-reference feature because he didn’t like having visible clickable links in the PDFs (he was big on what he claimed was “clean and simple design”). Therefore, he always, ALWAYS, manually typed references to other areas in a document. And he would frequently forget to check those references so when things were moved or renamed, the typed reference didn’t get updated. And because they were manually typed, FrameMaker couldn’t notify him that there was a problem with the cross-reference.
(We’re not even going to discuss his wording, which was always in the format “Reference X for Y”. Who the hell says “reference” that way? Or his habit of saying a section described how to do X, then immediately afterwards saying, “To do X:” Talk about repetitive and not adding any useful information. If your description and your directive are almost identical, delete one of them because they’re not useful. OK, I’m ranting again …)
Today I found a reference in a document we are giving to our customers that has one of these hand-typed, non-clickable references, and it refers to a chapter that no longer exists in the document.
I have no idea when or if I’ll ever be able to circle round to fix this, because now it’s just me and I have about 30 documents in queue. So fuck you, Peter, for being so worried about having things lined up just so that you’d spend hours fiddling with positioning but you couldn’t be bothered to check that your hand-typed references that people couldn’t click to get the information they needed were even accurate.
And did I mention that I discovered after he left that he had damned near 50-60 graphics in a single document that he did NOT store in the proper directory in Box, instead having them local to him on his own hard drive? I had to recreate all of those because he decided that the process we had discussed and agreed to “took too much time”. It took me days to recreate those bloody things because the process we agreed to wasn’t one he liked.
He has hundreds of directories of graphics, and most of the directories and the graphics in them are labeled with just the date, and most of them are duplicates! He’d take pictures one day and save them in a directory, and then he’d copy them all over to a new directory the next time he was editing a couple of them or taking them again, and rinse and repeat for dozens of directories.
When I asked him where those missing pictures were he told me all I had to do was open FrameMaker and then select the right directory and FrameMaker would update the path, as if he thought I didn’t know how to do that. Dude, I checked the Object Properties to get the complete directory path for each of those graphics, and the folders they were supposed to be in didn’t exist. Because you apparently either had them on your hard drive in a location that wasn’t being backed up by our backup utility or you had them on your personal external hard drive. They sure weren’t where they were supposed to be. So much for his “I store everything up in 2 or 3 places to be sure there’s a backup.” But the point is, they weren’t where they were supposed to be because you’re an ASS.
Only single saving grace? He is an ASS that is no longer there (and you can rant here about him all you want of course).
Second saving grace: people I know and respect are telling me that no, I am not overreacting when I rage about yet another thing I’ve found he’s done.
I swear, every time I open something he worked on, I expect to find at least one UXB-equivalent. If not more. It’s taking time to fix it all, and it’s time I don’t have anymore. Worse, most of these issues are things I’d pointed out to him when reviewing his documents and he went ahead and did it his way, anyway.
I had originally wondered why I was kept and he was let go when we had to reduce headcount, since he’d been with the company at least 3 years longer than I had and knew a lot more about the products (and where everything was saved, of course, because no one other than him understood how he was organizing things).
But now I know: he was a crappy writer and he was a slow writer, and I know this because one of the people I write for said Peter had been dragging his feet on a document for more than a year (!!!) and another said that I had raised the standard of our documentation by my thoroughness.
For example, he had a (short) chapter devoted to how to log in to one of our software products that used a browser UI. What he didn’t include was what to do if you couldn’t log in, or even how to use the “send me my username/password” link that was on the same log-in page. But he spent plenty of time adding screenshots with little blow-up sections for every. single. step. of that log in. These are user manuals, not fucking comic strips.
And for any of your management who might lurk here: Problems like this cost sales. I’ve passed on recommending software solutions because of broken documentation, or the dreaded circular reference in the documentation.
Lord, I hope they don’t!
This makes me very glad that I have my documents all to myself! Sometimes my linked files are messy, but they’re messy in a way that I understand.
I hope your coworker doesn’t go on to find a job with a big pay raise, like a lot of incompetent former coworkers do. I hate when that happens. 
What irks me no end is that I am a far better writer than he is, and I am far better with the tools of our trade than he is, and yet I’ve had long periods of unemployment thanks to various economic downturns and he’s been almost continuously employed.