For your entertainment: sad tale of woe

[jg70124]

I've posted about my situation before, and got lots of good responses. Now,
however, no responses are required - I am just posting to vent.

I'm working on a book with two professors of marketing, both older, both
significantly less skilled with their computers than they think they are.
There are also a bunch of other people involved: a research assistant, an
editor, a consultant, and the publisher. There are Macs and Windows
machines, and Word versions from 97 to 2003.

My job was to help the professors put their (disorganized) material in some
sort of order, and to format the chapters (20) for the publisher. To do
that, I put the material into an outline, created a style sheet, removed all
the character formatting, and applied the new styles. That took about 6
weeks. I did it at the beginning of the process, and since no one else on
the project had any understanding of styles, I became the de facto "keeper
of the format". Which means that when ever anyone changed anything, they
had to pass the material back to me to fix the format - I've been doing it
for about 7 months now.

Last week, the lead author made a bunch of last minute changes, so he gave
me the chapters this morning and asked me to do a final sweep of the
formatting. When I opened the first chapter, I discovered - much to my
horror - that the styles were gone. The footnotes (100's per chapter) were
disconnected. The captions and cross references were broken. The document
was all character formatted.

It turns out that at some point last fall, the lead author (who doesn't know
styles) decided he didn't like the formatting (despite the fact that it was
ordained by the publisher), so he hired a word processing temp to do a
reformat. And it turns out she didn't understand Word styles either. So
she converted all the materials in all the chapters to plain text, then
applied character formatting. Since the author has been happily making
changes to these plain text versions, we can't go back.

So now I'm sitting here thinking about spending 3-4 weeks re-doing the
formatting, rebuilding the footnotes, and recreating the tables.

Lesson learned: for the next book (starting in a week or so), leave the
thing in plain text until the last possible minute.

 

[Richard Neville]

Not much you can do now, but next time make a backup copy regularly to
another medium, such as a CD, that temps and others can't mess with.

 

[Jay Freedman]

OMG! You have my utmost sympathy. Before you dive in, take a deep breath,
step back a minute, and think about things.

Look over the unformatted material and compare it to the formatted chapters.
It *might* be quicker to transfer the changes into the formatted files than
to format the unformatted ones -- but take into account the likelihood of
transcription errors.

If you're ever tempted to work for these professors again, or anyone like
them, get a stipulation in your contract that you can charge a healthy
premium for boneheaded things like this.

 

[Kel]

I know your pain.

Why is it that people think that because they have
expertise in a particular area, they are instantly Word
whizzes and know better than we who do this stuff for a
living?!!!!

I have no advice, just a whole lot of sympathy.

Good luck.

 

[jg70124]

OMG! You have my utmost sympathy.
Thanks


Look over the unformatted material and compare it to the formatted chapters.
It *might* be quicker to transfer the changes into the formatted files than
to format the unformatted ones -- but take into account the likelihood of
transcription errors.

Not really feasible - there's something like 1000 pages, all tolled, and one
of things that happened is the temp took out all the automatic pagination
and double spacing, and added in all the graphics (which the publisher
wanted in a separate file). She also used double ^p to mark the end of
paragraphs, all though a cursory glance gives me the impression she missed
at least 1/3 of the paragraphs. So I can't really do an automatic compare,
and the thought of doing it manually is horrifying.

If you're ever tempted to work for these professors again, or anyone like
them, get a stipulation in your contract that you can charge a healthy
premium for boneheaded things like this.

Well, I'm getting author credit and a share of the back end... since the
process of putting all their material into an outline actually involved
many, many meetings in which we all sat around a table considering what they
were really trying to do.