One of the most frustrating things about my job is having to sit and watch someone tie themselves up in knots over a document that I could have finished off for them six months ago, given the chance.
The director I work for has a tendency not to stop at triple-checking things, but fusses like an old woman, presumably seeking perfection in a medium which defeats him from the outset. My non-professional diagnosis is that he is mildly dyslexic, and my professional diagnosis is that he doesn’t know when to let it lie. Consequently, every document we have printed goes back and forth between him and the printers, with occasional detours via every other member of staff, for their input and observations.
Most members of staff don’t give a monkeys quite how the third bullet point of the nineteenth paragraph is worded, or whether we say most of our staff are qualified or most of our staff have qualified.
Today’s fun job was working out which of three printed pdfs was the most recent one, after the printer had got confused and made the latest set of amendments to an earlier version. I have to sympathise with the guy, who is probably hideously confused by the constant revisions.
The director finally decided that he preferred certain sections of one version, and certain other sections of another version, and proceeded to tear the chosen paragraphs of the first out in strips, and staple them to the appropriate places of the second. This, obviously, would reduce the existing levels of confusion.
September 30, 2004
Dotting the Eyes
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