• Mood: working
• Music: Cold Missouri Waters--James Keelaghan--Then Again

The usual run-around

Had another fire-drill of a job at work today. 70 pages of edits needed ASAP. The customer service person out on the west coast wanted an ETA right away so he could decide if he should stick around the office or go home and come back later. Well, there were a couple of big pieces being inserted into the files that had to be typed up as no data was provided. That's a slow process not so much because it takes us a long time to type them, but proofreaders must read them letter-by-letter for accuracy. They can usually read word-for-word (which doesn't sound that much faster, but it is).

So I broke up the job into its component files and put them on the board, grabbing one for myself that needed some special attention to the style. Finished that and grabbed another chunk of files that had little edits to each one. My second batch was the last that was on the board. My fabulous co-workers had grabbed the rest of the files so quickly that fredcritter missed out completely!

By the time we had our temps (excuse me, Spherion Associates) type up the big inserts, the files were all coded and mostly proofread. By the time the last three files that the big inserts went into (I saved one for fredcritter so he could get in on the fun) were coded, the rest of the job was proofread. Now just the proofreading of these last three and it'll be ready for final quality check. (This involves copyfitting the pages and updating folios and associated tables of contents.) That should take about a half hour. Another half hour to have a proofreader look it over, probably. Any final edits made after that process and it's off to customer service with a proof.

So just a few hours of busy-ness in an otherwise stately night of work.