An Editor's Tale

You might have seen my tweet about the inevitability of being dumped on. It happened. Here is the tale.

Designer J and editor me had a job to do. Deadline was Monday. We had asked for a few days to do the work, preferably a week.

We were copied in to a discussion which lasted about three weeks in which a project team tried to agree on the text the flier in question should contain.

I have only two requests as an editor. I want a complete, unformatted file. And I want a brief - what is the final result to look like? Not a brief that I have to piece together from emails and minutes of meetings but one brief, briefed by one person in writing.

I got the text on Monday (yeah, deadline day) although there were still some emails flying around suggesting alterations. I asked for the brief three times in the previous week but got none.

At 4.00p.m. I invented my own brief and sent J a best guess at the text and format. He produced a flier template overnight. We finished it next day. Two people told me that the finished document was not what they expected even though nobody had told us what they expected.

We made one tweak and finalised the flier in a brief discussion at a Tuesday afternoon meeting. It is being printed for the weekend launch. If you absolutely gotta get dumped on then it is worth putting up the biggest umbrella you have.

Me and J do not want our genius to be used in evidence for future dumping. We have lives too.