My TVMP project published our notice last month. Someone immediately noticed a problem with it and we're now working on a correction. At a meeting Tuesday we discussed final lingering issues, whether we needed a table entry or a seven-word phrase in a note to the table or both or neither. Very minor stuff.
Wednesday the RDM e-mailed out the correction out to the legal office for review. Two minutes later she went on vacation for the week.
When I opened the file, I noticed several changes since the last version I had seen. Now, to be clear, this is bad. Every team member should see the document in its final form before it goes out, and the tech writer should theoretically be last of all. On a quick glance, I didn't see anything that would cause big problems, but it's inconsistent and messy and not how things are supposed to work. This offends the anal-retentive, punctilious side of my personality, to the extent that I have one. I didn't want to retract the notice over non-substantive issues, though, especially not on my own nonexistent authority, so I left it alone for now.
Half an hour after the file was mailed out, someone else mailed out another version and suggested using his version over the RDM's. His version had his changes tracked, and while that's better for internal use, reviewers should see a clean document. His edits were also, in technical terms, shitty. There were missing spaces between words, the same thing formatted two different ways in one paragraph, and misspellings in words like "Los Angeles" and "although." This guy who was trying to speak for the team was also not on the team to begin with.
I had to get someone with authority involved in this. I checked the RDM's away message. It said her boss was filling in for her. Her boss's away message, though, said he hadn't been in since yesterday, and it was now 10:30, so I assumed he wasn't around at all. His boss was in the office, but also unavailable at the moment. I tried the team lawyer - beneath them, but still above me. I told her that I needed to review the document, giving her one example of a minor problem with it, and someone definitely needed to do something with the versions already out there.
She sent out a third version. This version fixed just that one problem I mentioned and left all the rest alone.
In the end, I cleaned up the document and brought the right people into the loop and this project remained unimportant, but I spent more sweat on it Wednesday than I had over the previous six months. It's not that I deserve a medal over it, I was just doing my job, but everyone else on the project deserves an anti-medal.
