Tattletale
Last week at work was annoying. I got stuck editing a review by one of our less-talented free-lance analysts. This piece in particular was worse than usual, very sloppily written and missing some relevant information that readers would likely want to know.
So I gave it a thorough editing, did lots of revising to make his prose a little more readable, and made requests for pretty basic things, like a transitional paragraphs here and a conclusion there and perhaps, I don't know, a little bit of subjective assessment, given that this was a review. Nothing that should take more than a couple of hours, though. I sent it to him Wednesday afternoon, asking to please get it back to me by end of day Thursday.
Well, Thursday morning, I found an e-mail in my mailbox from him. It started with "Sorry, Ted," and continued with a rash of complaints: how he disagreed with the new focus I was telling him to make (I was suggesting, not telling); how I had introduced errors (a couple of minor grammatical errors cropped up in my rewriting of his entire introduction); how I had waited until the last minute to send this back to him and had only given him two hours to fix it (try a day and a half...); how I was asking him to re-test the products (nope, I was asking for info he should have had from his test); how he had tried to e-mail me and call me to give him a call to talk about the piece and I had never gotten back to him (complete lie)...
Oh, and he CC'd my manager.
Needless to say, I was pissed, angrier than I've been in a while. The e-mail alone was infuriating, because it was complete and utter bullshit. And the fact that he CC'd my manager was a nasty, and unprofessional, slap in the face.
Fortunately, my manager knows me, and he knows this analyst, and he saw what I had done with the review, so he wasn't angry or concerned that I had done anything wrong. But I was still left having to be moderately courteous to the analyst so I could work through the edits with him. And I had to do it over the phone, and all the while, he continued to be obnoxious, putting up a fight over every request I made.
However, I refuse to work with this analyst again, and I told my manager as much. I'm tempted to give the guy a piece of my mind once the article has shipped, but that would probably do more harm than good in the long run. But at least it seems that my manager is realizing that we need to use this guy less.
In other news, the A's managed to lose two games this weekend to the Kansas City Royals, who had been on a 19-game losing streak. I was at the game Saturday night, and Oakland played pathetically, squandering runners in scoring position time and time and time again.
I'm not in a great mood. Can you tell?
So I gave it a thorough editing, did lots of revising to make his prose a little more readable, and made requests for pretty basic things, like a transitional paragraphs here and a conclusion there and perhaps, I don't know, a little bit of subjective assessment, given that this was a review. Nothing that should take more than a couple of hours, though. I sent it to him Wednesday afternoon, asking to please get it back to me by end of day Thursday.
Well, Thursday morning, I found an e-mail in my mailbox from him. It started with "Sorry, Ted," and continued with a rash of complaints: how he disagreed with the new focus I was telling him to make (I was suggesting, not telling); how I had introduced errors (a couple of minor grammatical errors cropped up in my rewriting of his entire introduction); how I had waited until the last minute to send this back to him and had only given him two hours to fix it (try a day and a half...); how I was asking him to re-test the products (nope, I was asking for info he should have had from his test); how he had tried to e-mail me and call me to give him a call to talk about the piece and I had never gotten back to him (complete lie)...
Oh, and he CC'd my manager.
Needless to say, I was pissed, angrier than I've been in a while. The e-mail alone was infuriating, because it was complete and utter bullshit. And the fact that he CC'd my manager was a nasty, and unprofessional, slap in the face.
Fortunately, my manager knows me, and he knows this analyst, and he saw what I had done with the review, so he wasn't angry or concerned that I had done anything wrong. But I was still left having to be moderately courteous to the analyst so I could work through the edits with him. And I had to do it over the phone, and all the while, he continued to be obnoxious, putting up a fight over every request I made.
However, I refuse to work with this analyst again, and I told my manager as much. I'm tempted to give the guy a piece of my mind once the article has shipped, but that would probably do more harm than good in the long run. But at least it seems that my manager is realizing that we need to use this guy less.
In other news, the A's managed to lose two games this weekend to the Kansas City Royals, who had been on a 19-game losing streak. I was at the game Saturday night, and Oakland played pathetically, squandering runners in scoring position time and time and time again.
I'm not in a great mood. Can you tell?