Stupidity vs. incompetence

The team lawyer on my most minor active project sent an e-mail this morning with two different links, and the e-mail said that OGC had reviewed the final rule and had comments. She did not, however, put the edited version in the project folder, where the team can work on it.

I figured out that one of the links led to a usable version of the document. Next I had to decide what to do about it. Should I put it in the folder myself or not? It would probably save trouble for everyone, but while it could be called a reasonable assumption from the lawyer’s e-mail she didn’t explicitly ask me to, and even if she had I’m not supposed to do things unless explicitly asked by the project manager. And while some managers might notice and appreciate me taking the initiative, she wouldn’t.

In the end, I decided to do nothing and wait to be told. An e-mail later this morning vindicated me: it was the project manager asking the lawyer to put the document in the folder. The manager hadn’t found the correct link in the e-mail. So my inaction clearly hadn’t caused any problems yet, and who knows what confusion action might have caused.

 The lawyer, however, didn’t listen. She e-mailed the document to us as a file attachment. This is stupid. Version control, version control, version control. To keep things from getting any worse, I put it in the folder myself and sent an e-mail saying as much within two minutes. Yup, I’m on top of things, all right.

20 minutes after that, the project manager sent out an e-mail saying she had put the document in the folder. I checked, and there it was, right there with a different name next to the copy I had put there. I deleted the one I had put there and sent an e-mail saying as much. She replied saying no, “you can leave it,” she wants backup in case we lose the copy we’re working in because as far as she knows the link didn’t work, and she wants it in this other special folder she’s created for it. But wait, this confuses me – should I leave it where it is, or put it in the special folder? Which one?

This is what I get for trying to help. I should have just let the computer-illiterate and the incompetent figure it out between themselves.

Being the smartest person around is scary

This document I'm editing is giving me a headache.

For some perspective, I'm sick at the moment. Much better than yesterday, in which I took a half-day and shouldn't have gone in at all, but still, I've gone through at least six cough drops today and blown my nose four times and it's not even noon. And yet I can still say that the editing is responsible for the headache, because recent edits to the document by the lawyer were just that bad.

Most of the annoying bits were relatively minor mistakes, but annoying because I expect better of lawyers. I guess I was spoiled by an unusually good lawyer on the doomed project.

Also, she didn't send me the document with her edits at all. To the other team members, and one of them thought to CC me, but she didn't. How she thought her concerns would have been addressed I have no idea.

But the thing that really made my head throb was one bit where she asked if it matched the current boilerplate. It was hard for me to figure out the answer to that. The templates are in the middle of being revised. Separately, the Web site with the old versions changed to a new URL, so I couldn't find those on my own. I had to get my supervisor's help. I wanted to be extra sure about what was wrong on a project at this stage, so I painstakingly compared the old template and the new one to each other and to the relevant bit of the FR. That took half an hour or more.

What did I find in the end? I found that no, it didn't match the new template. Or the old one. Or any template, because there's no template for this bit. This bit is explicitly up to the team. And more specifically, the lawyer. There is no template, and this area is primarily her responsibility, and she effectively blamed me for incompetence because she didn't know that.