CMYK - A Bruce story

I'm a busy man at work. The editors all refuse to work with Bruce. I typically have two or three books that I'm working on at the same time because they refuse to work with him anymore. Really. One turned in her resignation when she found out he was laying out her book. The boss finally relented and gave it to me.

Even so, a few months back he was given the images for an upcoming book to redraw (if line art) and resize. I rolled my eyes and continued my work. I really didn't have time to do the art right now and he might even get some of it right. Maybe.

I've done books with him where he did the art and I did the layout. I ask you, how many times should you have to send something back to a person before it's correct? Once? Maybe twice? How about a dozen times? No drawing was sent back less than six times. Most were ten to twelve times. And I wasn't unclear with the problems. I circled each problem in red and then discussed them with Bruce.

Sometimes he'd make a black line CMYK so it was black, but with 4 layers of ink it was fuzzy and raised enough that I could tell what the picture was blindfolded. No, really, I blindfolded one of the editors and handed her printouts of the pictures to see if she could tell what the drawing was supposed to be.

The pictures were never sized right (either 1 column or 2). The fonts were the wrong size and the wrong font. Often he'd change things that were right so they became wrong, but that's true of everything he does.

The editor for this book asked for printouts of the images for this book the other day. He printed five before getting distracted. When he finally gave them to her, the following week, there was a lot missing. He insisted that he never got them, but she had records of the exact date and time she sent them to him, the names of the files, and the folder they were in on his computer. Sure enough, there they were. Both the ones he'd done and the ones he didn't do.

What's saddest about this story is that he used to be able to do this. He'd done graphics work at the Pentagon. He did chapters and drawings here for years. Not the best or the fastest, but certainly passable.

Something else I never made clear is that he's got 22 years on me. He's been tested for Alzheimers, Parkinsons, ADD, and Epilepsy but keeps coming up negative. He was on ADD meds for awhile but they just made him fall asleep at his desk.

Now I have to decide if I'm gonna correct his work when it comes to me or keep sending it back until HE does it right.