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.

Rats from a sinking ship

The economist who was on the doomed project from the start has left. I think he's gone to grad school. He got out just in time. The doomed project just got back from the latest review, this time by the department head, and his comments seemed to indicate he wanted to use a different approach on the economic section, meaning throw out and start over from scratch. Obviously, that would be bad. We were hoping to persuade the department head that the economic section only needed tweaks rather than a complete overhaul, and I think we've succeeded. But I'm not sure, and I seem to remember one of the economist's last statements was that starting over would take four months.

I feel sorry for the new guy.