I finished my second read-through of the galleys yesterday, did my spreadsheet and packaged it all up to go back to NYC. BTW, I was thrilled because my spreadsheet is only about a page and a half and it's setup landscape, so that means even fewer rows of corrections since the paper is on its side, not up and down. Hopefully, whatever I (or my mom) didn't catch, the publisher's proofreader did. I have this thing about perfectionism and I hate missing mistakes in the galleys.
Life has been absolutely, pedal-to-the-metal hectic for me this week. Y'all have heard about the galleys and that I had to have them ready to mail today, but the EDJ (Evil Day Job) has been totally crazy too. I usually try to catch up on a few emails while I'm there, but I haven't had time! One of my specialists has a huge project that he needs first thing Monday morning and I've been working nonstop on that all week.
Take yesterday. I thought I was winding up on the project. Everything had been proofread, the formatting fixed and all I had left to do is add a PDF to the end of the report. I transform the PDF into a TIFF file, insert it into the document and breeze through one last time. Only it turned out not to be one last time. The PDF/TIFF document didn't scan well. Of the 5 pages, only 2 were readable. And 1 of those had parts of it highlighted which had the same effect as dragging a black magic marker over the words. Clearly, I needed to replace this version with a clean version.
My challenges on this endeavor? My maintenance specialist was on vacation and won't be back until Monday, so I clearly can't ask him for the article. The magazine was dated Jan-Mar 1996. That's right. The magazine was 10 years old.
An online search turned up nothing useful, but I did figure out that "Airliner" magazine was a Boeing publication. I headed to the Boeing website, but couldn't find anything. To shorten the story considerably, I finally found a hard copy of the issue on another floor, tried to scan it in, ran into huge problems, and settled for copying it and getting the gray scale to work so everything was readable. But when I tried to scan it in again, 1 of the 5 pages remained illegible. I ended up scanning it in full color and printing it on a color printer. It took me almost the entire day to get these 5 pages in and it involved something like three trips to another floor.
So I didn't have even five minutes to answer email or even read my work email. Today, things should calm down. I hope. And with galleys done, I can get back to work on writing the WIP.
You know, I exhausted myself just reading my litany. :-) Time for another day of fun and frolic at the EDJ.
