Monday, October 05, 2009

Index - A Bruce story

There was this book that was written 50 years ago. Only 3 copies were produced. All type written on onion skin paper with photos glued to the pages. I had scanned in every picture and every page of text. Someone else had rekeyed the book with a few errors. Bruce was given the job of laying out the new version. He was picked for this task because there was no set style for this book. If he messed up there was no standard to compare to, so it's not really a screw up.

You'll recall the original Bruce story where I kept telling him to go back in to InDesign. It was this book he was working on back then. This woman had sat next to him for probably half the time he'd spent on this book. Mostly it was to keep him on track, but it was also, partially to help him make changes. But she'd gotten tired of her job. It was no longer what she'd been hired to do and wasn't what she wanted to do.

We're down to the index. The original book had an index, but the layout was radically altered. I mean we were using the front AND back of each page for one thing. We needed to correct the page numbers in the index. In our weekly staff meeting the boss asks Bruce how long it'll take him to complete the index. He says it'll take him 3 weeks. I break into a coughing fit.

After the meeting I sit down next to Bruce at his desk. "Sounds like you could use some help with the index. You drive." I picked up a print out of the uncorrected index and a bound print out of my old scans and we started. I picked out any word in pages 1-100, looked it up in the old copy, gave him a few keywords to search for, he took the new page number and put it in the new index. Three days later we were done. Two and a half weeks under what it would have taken him and a day and a half less than it would have taken me.

The boss was annoyed that I'd had so little faith in her pet employee that I jumped in to help and proved that three weeks was way too long for this job to take. When she complained to my direct supervisor my supervisor laughed in her face.

2 comments:

BrianAlt said...

"When she complained to my direct supervisor my supervisor laughed in her face."

Good!

Malaise Inc said...

You need to look at this differently. There is a clear social benefit to all the covering you, and others, do for poor Bruce.
Because of your magnanimity, there is an open slot in a group home somewhere that can be used by someone else.