next entryPunctuation Potty
Doing things right the first time saves time! (especially my time!)
You know when you get those days where you wish you hadn't bothered to get up, because with the benefit of hindsight you'd have realised that the day you were about to have was going to be so utterly awful it wasn't worth the energy in the first place?
Well today was one of those days. To appreciate how annoying it was it might be beneficial to give you a little idea of what it is I do. I work for a company who builds websites for other companies. That process involves us getting copy from those companies and other content in order to put on their new websites. But please bear in mind, we are not a copy writer company, nor are we paid to peruse a company's copy to check for erroneous data, bad spelling and misuse of punctuation.
With that in mind then you can imagine my horror after I've spent the best part of a 2 weeks tweaking this website with various amendments that have been requested, the day that the site is to be launched I receive several very long emails, each containing copious amounts of punctuation corrections. And the changes are not even in a sensible format. The easiest way to make lots of copy changes in one go on a website is to have the complete and correct copy in front of you so you can cut and paste it in one foul sweep. But oh no, I've got what must be over 500 punctuation changes to do in the format of "in the first paragraph on the 21st line please put a comma next to the, and after the and..." RIDICULOUS!
But not only ridiculous but just plain stupid, such as wanting double spacing after each full stop (no sorry you can't have that because the browser removes excess spaces from copy all by itself). By the end of the day I am just about at my wits end, why can't people CHECK the content they are sending over before it is implemented into code, is it really that difficult?
For god sake, shouldn't it be a common decency to make sure you do your job correctly the first time to prevent unnecessary work being carried out time after time?
Needless to say I've had a bad day and it's made me realise why it was I left my last job, perhaps this one will go the same way.
Posted by Abi on the October 28, 2005 9:30 PM
(add extra space by inserting an (non-breaking-blank) )
People that don't know about publishing (web or otherwise) often make the mistake of rushing out content and then sending fixes and corrections afterwards.