The sore throat seems to be getting better. Instead of achey and raw, it now just feels a little scratchy-raw, as if I'd spent a lot of time yesterday screaming at the top of my lungs.

Which isn't too farfetched a thought, considering what a bad mood I was in yesterday.

I'm not the world's most upbeat person, but I try to be polite to my co-workers. I try to smile and be pleasant at work. I actually like most of the people that I work with most of the time.

But there are some days...

Okay, look. We deliver documents to our customers as a matter of course. Formal requirements documents, interface descriptions, installation guides, user manuals, status reports - all kinds of documents. We average a little more than one document a day, usually, that has to be delivered.

Of course, we don't deliver a document (or so) a day. They tend to be delivered in clumps. Three on Friday. Two on Monday. One on Thursday. Like that.

It's part of my job to review every document that leaves our facility, to make sure we don't look like complete asses to our customers because we have poor grammar (One of our documentation people uses that awful spoken slang where she'll leave out the word "to be" - as in "This dish needs washed." Which, as an aside, makes my spine want to curl up and hide in the base of my brain. If you do this, stop it immediately. You sound horrifyingly ignorant. Anyway, she knows better than to use it in a document, but sometimes it slips through anyway.) or because we don't know how to count (Our other documentation person refuses to use Word's auto-numbering system for figure numbers, which means that in documents with lots of pictures, like user manuals, I have to be especially vigilant against things like, say, two different pictures labelled Figure 3-35.) or whatever else.

Just lately, in the past two weeks or so, the number of errors has dramatically risen. I don't know why.

Well, I know some of it. Some of it is that we had two major deliveries recently - one last Friday and one Monday, and then another largish delivery yesterday, and because our documentation people get their assignments by project, one of them has been vastly overworked for the last week or so, while the other has been doing her usual workload. So mistakes get through.

But yesterday, for the third time in two weeks, I learned that a document was delivered to the customer with at least one major error in it. Something that should never have made it through my inspection. And then I found out that it hadn't made it through my inspection - but that the documentation person (they do the delivery e-mails) had sent our customer her working version of the document instead of the official one that I had signed off on.

So despite my efforts, we still looked like ignorant asses.

And then she realized that the two documents that were being delivered yesterday - which she hadn't started working on yet - were going to add up to over 200 pages, with more than 50 flowcharts in them. And flowcharts are a major pain in the ass to clean up.

So one of the documents was given to the other documentation person (I lay the blame for this on their manager, who should have realized last week that the workload on the one was way too heavy, and shifted some stuff around) and I was asked to start looking at the flowcharts before they were cleaned up, because my review of flowcharts is both grammatical and technical, and takes forever.

And then, no less than five times before 9am - before I'd finished my paperwork from the day before, people came to the door of my office to ask if I'd started looking at those flowcharts yet.

When the author - a friend - asked if I'd gotten the e-mail and if that was okay, I sighed and said, "I guess so. I'm going to finish up this overdue paperwork and then start on it."

When the project's manager - another friend - came in, I said, "Yeah, I just talked to [the author] and I'll get to it as soon as I finish this other stuff."

When the documentation person - who is a very sweet, if somewhat airheaded woman - asked, I growled at her. "I'll get to it as soon as I can."

When her manager - who I must confess is one of the people in the office I really don't like at all - came to ask about it, I snapped at him. "I have other things to do. I'll get to it when I can!"

And when my manager - who is a fantastic guy that I like a lot - came in to ask, I just about bit his head off. "You're the fifth today! I'll get to it as soon as I can!"

When I finally did get to it, I closed my door and put up a note. "YES, I am looking at the flowcharts now!"

(The author and the project's manager both told me later that they saw my note and were highly amused by it.)

The flowcharts, by the way, didn't make a lot of sense. Flowcharts are a pain in the ass for GUI applications - especially database applications, when you've got a lot of options for things that can be done on any given screen. So I had to keep going to the author to explain why she had designed a bunch of infinite loops. And some of the terminology was stupid. ("Review," to me, means "look at." To the customer, apparently, "review" means "clear the screen and start over.")

The project's manager, at 2:00, decided to cut nearly 50 pages out of one document. I wound up working late again, though not absurdly so, thank goodness.

And she (the project's manager) also kept coming to me to make sure I was "in the loop" on some political stuff going on in the office, mostly having to do with scheduling and blame. I think the wrong person is going to end up getting blamed, but there's not too much I can do.

It was just not a good day.

All of which is certainly more than you really wanted to hear about my day yesterday, so I'll shut up about it.

When Matt got home with Penny last night, she'd kicked her socks off in the car. For some reason, the sight of her cute, flat-bottomed, tiny feet made me smile.

Thank the gods for my family.

--Liz