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.

It never rains but it pours

For most of the past couple months, things have been relatively slow and easy. My projects haven't demanded much from me other than attending meetings. I have filled in for other writers or peer-reviewed their documents, but either way it's not as stressful and doesn't require as much careful attention as projects of my own do. I took a week-long vacation for Thanksgiving, and then on the first day back, had a medical emergency that kept me out of work for most of the following week. And right now it's the middle of the holiday season. There are holiday parties interrupting work and every project is slowing down because key people are on vacation or are about to be.

Except for those projects that are speeding up, in hopes of squeezing something out before the vacations. Like one of mine. A new project I was assigned to is trying to get things moving, and there's a kickoff meeting this afternoon.

And several projects of another writer's. Not only is he unusually busy at the moment, but he's going to be out for a while due to a medical problem of his own. My boss asked me yesterday if I could fill in for him on one of them. I said I wasn't sure, because of that kickoff project, but I was given the assignment anyway and told that things could be shuffled again afterwards if necessary. So I'm working on that now, and it needs quite a bit of work. It's not a huge rule, but it has a short deadline. I got started on that today, and it's been keeping me busy. Needs a fair amount of work, and it's a type of document for which guidance is lacking.

And then this morning, H. called to tell me about a meeting for the doomed project. It's been outside the building under the review of another agency for a couple months now, but someone just noticed overlap between the doomed project and another one. (I feel a bit guilty about this, because I had helped with the other project briefly, so maybe I could have called the problem to someone's attention earlier.) The two project teams are butting heads a bit about which one should change to accommodate the other. There was a meeting about it. It conflicted with the kickoff meeting for my other project. So I spent a lot of time today trying to figure out which meeting I should go to, and then preparing other writers for the other one.

So after a month of having nothing worth mentioning to do, I get a new project, do a lot of work on someone else's project, and have something go wrong on my most important project, all in one morning. How exciting.

I covered my ass...

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.

More broad, less deep

For a year or even more, about 80 percent has been on the doomed project, with the rest on two other projects. (I've called one "the blackmail project" and the other "the minor project," but really both were fairly minor.)

That seems to have changed, though. The doomed project doesn't demand so much from me now, while other projects have picked up. One, I was assigned to more than a year ago when the tech writer on it left, and then the project's document promptly left the building, so it's been mine according to the spreadsheet but there was nothing to do about it until it came back last month. And another project was similar. A tech writer left last month, and I was assigned a project of hers, and this past Wednesday the team met for the first time since May. All I've had to do so far was take minutes at that meeting and move a file around, but still, it's becoming more and more active.

This is a mixed blessing. I guess it's good for me. In theory, taking minutes at meetings is part of my job, but I haven't had to do it in a while, because on the doomed project that's what the other writer is for and my other two projects haven't had that kind of meeting in a while either. Stretching my thinking muscles in a lot of little ways - listening to the important stuff, figuring out meaning from context, concentrating on tasks even if they're boring.

That's a big part of the problem: buckling down and typing up my notes right away without getting distracted by things like this. Big surprise, I'm sure. Based on my typing speed in words per minute, I could turn my notes on a notepad into the official notes from a meeting in half an hour. Organizing it to make it logical and expanding on it beyond my personal shorthand would take another 10 or 20 minutes - still a very reasonable time for a minor task. But if I let myself go to reddit or do stuff like this, that could add four hours. I need to practice concentrating.

Beyond that, I've already been reminded of how much I depend on familiarity with a small number of projects. Just to type up those minutes I had to ask two different SMEs to explain things about which my notes were incomplete. This is part of the "listen closely" thing, and it's part of preparing myself in advance, but it's also partly inevitable. No way to be as familiar with new stuff as with old stuff.

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.

Way, way, way down the totem pole

"Did you hear about the meeting?" H., the supervisor of the doomed project asked as soon as she saw me around 1 p.m., sounding even more harried than usual.

"What meeting?" I replied intelligently. A briefing was planned for tomorrow morning to explain the doomed project to a bigwig in our department, and I was annoyed about the early hour of the meeting but other than that thought it would be a routine matter of note-taking, and it had been on my calendar for about a week with no changes, so I didn't see why she'd be asking about that.

It turns out, that briefing had been changed to 3 p.m. today. No one had thought to invite me until now.

Oh well. I had work to do, but no meetings or anything specific that conflicted with it, so I went easily enough. I claimed the chair by the computer and logged in. No one had told me I'd be using it, but it's a habit. And it's a good thing I did, or at least it's a good thing someone did, because there was a PowerPoint presentation, and they figured they might as well put it up on the screen. But since no one had given it to me, it took 10 minutes and three people to find.

After the meeting was over, I was the last to leave because I had to collect my stuff and log off the computer. Someone turned the lights off behind them while I was still there. I objected, but no one noticed.

Overheard in the men's room

"This is not a rational decision. It is a decision that will be rationalized, with science and engineering, but let's not start with the science and engineering and see where that gets us. We know where we want to be."