Half-assed

Most of the work we tech writers do is on rulemakings. Not all of it, though. There are occasional miscellaneous projects, chief among them being applications to continue doing certain things. It's a "don't burden the public too much" thing; certain kinds of regulatory requirements have to be reviewed every few years to see how much time and/or money people are spending meeting those requirements.

I find working on these applications to be both annoying and reassuring at the same time, as odd as that might sound. How is that possible? Because, you may have noticed, I sometimes (often) tend to do some things (many things) in a half-assed way around here. I mean, I have my excuses, and working hard often just genuinely doesn't matter, but I have to admit that I'm not the most diligent person here. Well, part of the annoyance is that it's harder to get away with that on these applications. Only one person works on an application at a time and they're simple in theory - take the previous one and update the numbers - but require attention to detail. So I actually need to pay attention here.

Another part of the annoyance is that there's often just no right answer. I go to the people in charge of the data and they often give me results that are half the numbers used in the last renewal just a few years ago. Or twice the numbers, or four times. We'd expect some natural change, but that degree of difference is very unlikely. It's much more likely that either I'm doing something wrong now or the person who did it last time did something wrong then. And this is where the reassuring part of these projects comes up, because you know, sometimes it looks very likely that the mistake was by the person before me. Maybe they didn't keep track of their sources well, maybe they didn't count something they should have, maybe they did something they thought was more complete than the person before them but it wasn't. But whatever the case, as annoying as it makes the application I'm working on, it's perversely reassuring when I realize that the hardest part of it is probably because someone else screwed up.