NaBloPoMo Day 14: work stuff

Ok, I know I just wrote that thing about not complaining about your job on your blog, but I’m running out of NaBloPoMo topics, so here’s some work stuff, which will hopefully not be controversial enough to get me fired.

* I’ve just finished my 2nd project, and I already have a third lined up that I’m starting on now. W00t! Money! And just in time for Christmas shopping.

* I don’t know if I mentioned that I’m working for this company through an agency? It’s sort of a temp-to-perm situation – I work through the agency for six months, and at the end of that, if the company likes what I’m doing, they can hire me as one of their employees, or we can call it quits. It’s nice because it also gives me an easy out if I decide that I don’t like the job (which I do, so far).

Anyway, have you ever had those conversations with your boss where you think you’re about to get in major trouble and then you realize that it has absolutely nothing to do with you at all? My manager called me and said he was a little concerned, because they had gotten their first bill from the agency, and apparently I was billing way more hours than they had allotted for these projects. I was kind of confused because he had given me an estimate of how much time I had for each one, and I knew that I was keeping it within that range.

Turns out? My hours were totally fine, but the agency was billing the company for a full 40-hour workweek every week, even though I’ve never once put in more than 30 hours. Heck, one week when I was between projects, I only billed thirteen hours. And yet they still got a bill for forty hours. The hell? So the problem was with the agency’s accounting department, it had nothing to do with me. It was a big relief, but it also made me wonder if the agency did that on purpose. You know, overbill the company and see if they notice or if they just pay it and move on. I’ve never worked with this agency before, and I don’t really know any of the people there, so I have no idea if they’re a shifty bunch or not. I’d like to think it was just an honest mistake, but it seems really odd since they did it for several weeks in a row. They had my timesheets that clearly stated how many hours I had put in. How hard is to read the number off the timesheet and enter that into their little billing column? What do you think, incompetence or fraud?

* My first project came back from the copy editor, and y’all, she is killing me. I’m sure she’s a lovely person, but I am obsessive about grammar and punctuation, and some of my stuff that she’s correcting is just flat-out wrong. For example, say you have a series of three things. I’d write it like this:

thing1, thing2 and thing3.

She turns it into: thing1, thing2, and thing3.

That 2nd comma before the “and” just eats at my soul because it is wrong, wrong, WRONG. But she’s the editor, so I have to make the corrections the way that she wants them, and oh, I just can’t even begin to tell you how much it bothers me. I know my spelling and punctuation isn’t always perfect, and a few of the things that she spotted were genuine goofs on my part, but some of the stuff that she’s changing makes me want to claw my eyeballs out.

And now, I’m going to go back to work and meditate to the glorious sounds of the cement truck in my driveway pouring the asphalt for my new driveway. Oohhhmmm…

11 thoughts on “NaBloPoMo Day 14: work stuff

  1. See, deep down you know that the editor’s right. Because you wrote, “[w]rong, wrong, WRONG.” Long live the serial comma!

  2. But if I put an “and” in there, it would be “wrong, wrong and WRONG”. I wouldn’t have used the 2nd comma.

    Honestly, I’ve been reading up on this (because I am a huge dork), and I think it comes down to the difference between journalism and English majors. English majors are comma-happy. I got my degree in journalism, therefore I disapprove of unnecessary punctuation.

  3. I agree with you and don’t like the Oxford comma, but (as you noted) grammar books say that it is more correct to use it. It wasn’t correct when we learned English in school but some dorkus decided it was a good idea.

    I use it about half the time, partly to annoy my editor and partly because I can’t decide whether it’s a battle I want to fight.

  4. I was also taught to use it, but it drives our caption editor KER-azy. He hates it, and I’m tired of hearing about it. So I stopped. He also says you don’t need a comma after an appositive, which is WRONG, because you do.

    I always thought this was correct.

    Cindy, a work-at-home mom in Seattle, uses commas.

    He INSISTS it should be:

    Cindy, a work-at-home mom in Seattle uses commas.

    Conversations about it were giving me a facial twitch, so I have let it go. 🙂

  5. Angie —

    You’re right and your caption editor is wrong. Wrong, I tell you.

    Incorrect use of commas make me twitch. I yell at a certain employee of mine at least 10 times a day about them. And trust me when I say I yell, because incorrect use of commas makes me twitch. And after seven freaking months, she should be finally getting it right, I think.

    Cindy — you were also right about the use of commas in a sequence if you were writing for a newspaper, but maybe your copy editor doesn’t view the work you are doing as needing to conform to AP style?

  6. I have to agree with Cindy on the 2nd comma. It has no place in the sentence. You need to say to the editor “don’t correct me, it sickens me”

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