The problem with asking for advice is that you might get it

I've been on three active projects for the past year or so: the doomed project, the blackmail project, and a third, minor project, which was relatively functional and smooth-running, as you may be able to tell simply by the lack of an ominous epithet.

Of course, you'll notice the use of the past tense. The current stage of the minor project has been taking longer than it should for the past several weeks. No big deal, there's little pressure on this rulemaking, but there's a schedule and we're behind it. This is partly my fault - in addition to normal minor mistakes, I changed the formatting of part 12(c) in a pretty big way, but when my supervisors looked at it they pointed out it should be changed back for good reasons, so that's two stages of review right there - but partly other peoples' fault and partly no one's fault as new information has come in.

And then the project manager made a big mistake: she had it reviewed by someone outside the normal process. Whether the idea was hers or someone else's, it was a dumb idea. The reviewer had a few dozen critiques. Most of it was trivial errors. Should be fixed, probably would have been eventually, no big deal even if not. A few were good points; we should be grateful for him catching them. The problem is that he disagreed with my bosses on part 12(c). Now, as the name of the blog says, we writers are low on the totem pole, but still, if we have any domain, proper formatting is it. And besides protecting our turf, there is also an objective reason to handle 12(c) our way. We put time into the "right" and the "wrong" way to underline text, but that's just because there are "right" and "wrong" ways. If we screw that up, and even if it gets by everyone else, it's still very, very unlikely to actually effect what regulations do. The formatting in 12(c), though, really could change the meaning of the regulations.

After explaining the reasons to the reviewer, he suggested doing 12(c) in a third way. The first and second ways were disagreements about how we should print the notice, but the third way would also reformat the table as published in regulations. That would fix some of the substantive problems but create others, my supervisor said. I don't really agree with her. In fact, I've come up with a fourth way to do it that I think would be best of all. It would also change how the table looks in regulations, but I think it would avoid all these issues. The only problem is that it would be more work for me, so I've been describing it as something to do in a future rulemaking rather than here, but even so my boss doesn't seem very positive about it.

However, I do agree with her that this kind of thing is our domain. And agree with her or not, she's my actual boss. So next week I'll probably have to persuade the project manager and the unexpected reviewer to please let us do 12(c) our way, pretty please, and put off any other methods for later. That probably won't be fun. Especially since I accidentally misspelled the unexpected reviewer's name in an e-mail. Twice.