This lady is an English teacher who's been roasting incels by correcting their grammar...

[wnylib]

83. Oh no. Bad deal for you to get the proofreading extra duty.

Last edited Wed May 22, 2024, 03:21 PM - Edit history (1)

My situation turned out better than that at the newspaper ad department.

In the paper's hierarchy, the artists and I were not supervised by the sales manager. Her memos were just "informative" ones,
supposedly so that we could work in good cooperation with sales. But the memos were actually an authority encroachment.

Way back then, the newspaper was still doing cut and paste pre-printing page layout. The artists and I were answerable to a guy who supervised layout and print deadlines. He was sympathetic to the problems we had with the sales manager, but the owner and manager of the paper catered to sales, which most businesses do because they bring in the operating and profit revenue.

So when my boss saw the proofed memo that I did, he laughed out loud, which drew a couple other people to look at it.

The sales manager complained to the publishing manager, who called together my supervisor, the sales manager, and me to discuss the "unnecessary embarrassment" and "disrespect" that I had shown to the sales manager. In that meeting, I explained what led up to it. My supervisor verified that sales reps made last minute changes after ads were proofed and laid out, leading to errors that were beyond our control and bad for the paper and its relationship to advertising customers.

I added that the sales manager had denied sales responsibility for errors in last minute, unproofed ads and instead accused me of making errors in proofreading. So, I proofed her memo to demonstrate to her that I was capable of catching mistakes, but only IF the material reached my desk. It was ludicrous to scapegoat me for ads that I never got to see.

In the end, with my supervisor's backing, the publishing manager finally recognized that the sales reps were costing money with their last minute, unproofed changes because the paper had to adjust billing when mistakes got printed and customers lost faith in the paper for future ads.

So the artists were instructed NOT to give the printout of last minute changes to ANY sales rep. They could only give them to me. It was a nuisance because it meant that I had to drop whatever I was working on to do a quick last minute proof, especially if I got more than one just 5 minutes before print time. But it did eliminate those errors in print. And it made sales reps more aware of the process at our end. Usually they had the changes soon enough to avoid that kind of crisis but in their busy schedule, waited too long to deliver the changes and thought we could do miracles for them.

I was only doing that job for a few months while waiting for results of resumes and interviews for a teaching position. When I got hired to teach ESL, I was happy to give notice. The sales supervisor made a snide comment to me about leaving and I told her that I looked forward to working with people whose English was better than hers. (My boss overheard that and offered to pay for my lunch.)