My ego-monster boss considers himself the creative director, art director, copy writer, layout king and the most creative person in the world. I, on the other hand, only have 30 years of art direction to my credit. Sometimes out of anger I set the type and layout of things the exact way he says.
The proof-reader then says to me, “Ter, I you blew this one!.”
To which I reply,“Nope, just doing it Sparky’s way!”
(This is the man who once said, “Yeah, well, if I’d a oughta saw that, it wouldn’t a oughta ran!”)
< Stealing this thread, appropriating it as my own >
Well, I’m throwing in the towel.
No not quitting, but I’m not wasting any actuall effort anymore.
I just got promo copy for which every “do NOT ever do this rule” was broken. It’s as if this person went out of her way to get the company’s style guide and do the exact opposite.
And it was approved by the VP.
If I say anything, they’ll just get pissed with me for stirring the shit. I don’t care anymore, I’m just going to lay it out as is. Spelling mistakes included.
So I admit defeat. If they want crap, let 'em have crap.
Go for it, Crayons. It won’t matter in the short run, but you’ll feel better.
I know I feel like a dog when I do it but I also feel like I got a little something back as well.
I let a headline my boss wrote for a granite flooring company that read, “Save Thousands in Costly Refinish Repair to Your Counter Tops” go by. The proofreader asked me about it and decided to let it slide by as well. (We are both months behind in our reviews and raises while he squanders thousands on Franchise Doctors.)
Professionally, ** I am horrified at your behavior! Horrified!!**
Well, this person pitches a fit whenever she’s asked do something… oh, say… within the scope of her job description. And if this pure and unadulterated crap is brought to her attention, she’s sure to say: “What? Since when have we been doing it that way???”
Even though the answer would be: “Since before you ever started working here which is why you were trained to do it ‘that way’.” And then the rest of us in my entire department will have to put up with her giant snit about how we keep changing everything on her.
I have decided that for the rest of the year, I will do no more than what is required to meet the deadline. It’s too frustrating otherwise. If the VP approves crap, then that’s what they want and that’s what they’ll have.
I say that once a year or so: “I’m just going to stop pretending to give a fuck.” But then my damn standards will kick in, and a piece of writing will come across my desk with the tears of the Baby Jesus saturating it, and I’ll go, “oh, come on, we are not presenting this steaming turd to our readers!!”
The upshot? Everyone gets mad at me, and readers get steaming turd anyway.
I need my paycheck . . . I need my medical & dental benefits . . . I need the tuition reimbursement so I can get my master’s . . .
The weirdest thing though… our proofreader is outsourced. He’s a brilliant dude who works from his own home office. We send him stuff and he charges us according to the length of the document.
Today, when I went to the Big Boss and, rather than say “This is crap, d’you really want me to work on it?”, I was more diplomatic and asked “Do I have the correct draft? This version seems very incomplete (15% was missing), and the front cover looks like a rough draft (i.e. crap that will have to be rewritten)…”
The answer? “Oh, yeah. I saw that, but I let it go for now.”
So… We paid the proofreader to correct stuff we knew all along we wouldn’t use???
:smack:
I’m telling ya, tonight is laundry night and résumé night.
By the way, Eve, never go thinking your work goes unnoticed. I notice exquisite editing when I read magazines. My ex was intereviewed in Out magazine last year, and the article was gorgeous. The economy of language was elegant, the punctuation was perfect, the rhythm of the story flowed as smooth rose petals… tears up… Oh, the woman who wrote it was both whimsically amusing and culturally savvy, while whoever proofread/edited took that story and polished it too a fine lustre.
And the entire issues was consistently as fine. Took my breath away.
You mean that the draft that was proofread was an obsolete copy? Or was it the copy from which the next draft would be made? If it was the latter, then wouldn’t the efficiency of the decision to proofread depend on what the proofreader gets paid balanced against how useful the proofreading is for the next (and ultimately the final) version?
Suppose I was the sort of person who was capable of writing a second draft of something. If my first draft was proofread, then that would be a great assistance in producing my second draft. Since I only know grammar implicitly as a native speaker, seeing how things were changed to make them work would offer a guide that would be easily accessable and from which I could model the verbaige (because it would probably be wordy) of my second draft.
To put it another way, if the proofreader is paid $X per page, let’s say, and the document is five pages long, then if an early proofreading can save the process from there $5X worth of time & labor, then it might be a perfectly reasonable decision.
OTOH, if it was an obsolete copy, then that does seem a little silly.
It’s entirely obsolete copy. In fact, the front cover (magazine-like) wasn’t “copy” at all. It looked like a very rough outline submitted as a list.
The draft tendered to the proofreader is supposed to be the complete and final draft. We do the basic editing and proofreading in-house, then the final version goes to the super-duper professional proofreader and into the print layout.
The proofreader thought he was given the wrong document and had called us to be told, “No, no, that’s the final draft”. But the proof reader coudn’t figure out what is supposed to be and there’s about 15% of material missing – entire sections weren’t submitted and as a result will not be proofread at all before it’s printed.
Imagine a magazine called Crayons with 18 feature articles. This month the main big feature article is entitled “How the Straight Dope Has Changed the World Forever”. What was submitted? A list of only 5 subjects under the heading “topics” and at the top of that list is the word “Dope”. That is what was tendered as the absolute final draft for the front cover.
No, there’s no mistake. It wasn’t an outline draft that got emailed by mistake. It wasn’t a proposed outline that got forwarded in error. That was the honest-to-Og final draft. It has already been plugged into our layout template as is (with the rest of the cover blank), and even if a whole glut of copy is added it will not be professionally proofread again because we just spent the magazine’s proofreading budget on that.
Nickname for cromalin proofs. They are composited from four layers of plastic that simulate the CMYK process colors. Kinda like much more accurate color keys, but IIRC you can’t separate them to look at each layer by itself.
