Today I had the kind of shitty day at work that made me want to quit again. A staffer wrote an article so grossly inaccurate I had to send the woman featured in the article the text and have her guide me through fixing it. She sent me two pages of notes. An accurate chronology, an accurate listing of the financial information involved (with a request not to divulge the deeply personal information the staffer thoughtlessly included), fixes for all the other things the staffer got wrong.
The article was given to me to copyedit yesterday afternoon; it was supposed to be in final review and sent to the printer today. Fortunately production gave up on it early. I’m going to spend way too much time Monday working out how to make the fucking thing publishable.
This isn’t my job and I want to quit.
But I guess I once again won’t.
This is the second time in a few months this has happened. A regular freelancer didn’t verify that a guy he wrote about was eligible to be in the magazine. The article was late, and I certainly played the odds by thinking I didn’t have to check the douchebag’s work, but the slap on his wrist was of the most miserably gentle variety, while I was put literally on double secret probation. (The probation was actually intensified a couple of days after it began. And it was secret.)
And since then, this douchebag has done this three more times. Every time, I’ve told his editor about it, and every time, it’s been rationalized away.
Now we’ve got this miserable staffer so grossly inaccurate in this one-page piece that I’m going to spend my four-day weekend obsessed over how to handle it when I get back on Monday.
This isn’t my job and I want to quit.