Including narrative of the week of August 16-21, 2010
[In the series of blog posts headed “What in the Name of Medicine?,” “medical media” may be used as a generic term for medical advertising/promotions, as a general field or as to a type or collection of firm(s). It does not refer to genuine medical academic publishing. Edit to title 7/2/13.]
Subsections below:
I. Preliminaries
The typical process of involving an editor in reading an item, and deviations from it in this 2010 case
A possible non-technical managerial desideratum: Truncating my time so as not to allow me to collect unemployment after I left [Agency X]
II. Significant measures of the Ferguson
Hard statistics on my work in 2010
Work divided up between different editors, and idiosyncrasies came into play
Seeing multiple versions of items in medical media: Different kinds of challenges
The notable peculiarities of procedure in the Suboxone account
Along with my busy work on a somewhat neglected account, Tweedle Dee pursues an agenda of beefing up a more regular staff including freelancers (and not including me)
III. Start of a narrative: The week of August 16-21
[Introduction]
In the last three weeks of my time at [Agency X], there was a final push to finish with the Suboxone account. The form of Suboxone we were doing promotional materials for was the new film version, yet to be approved by the FDA on August 30 or 31. The tablet form had already been approved and was in use for some years. (This distinction will be of point later.) The final push involved a collection of sales aids, brochures, and other items. This account was unique in my experience of working at divisions of [Agency X] in which such sales-related items were the typical product (my experience in this, as I’ve said, went back to 2001): the Suboxone items were weirdly handled in a process that involved close consultation on details with the client—for which a little managerial task force on our side was in place, of mainly two women who, it seemed, were pretty steadily working on computers in the meeting room called the Lizard, whether or not they were in contact with the client at any given time—and this consultation between client and [Agency X] was generally pretty steady and ad hoc.
And as with no other account I had seen at [Agency X], the client could make demands about changes to items at all sorts of times through the day, and thus the item went into motion and could be brought into editing for proofreading to see that changes were properly made (this request is typically called “check changes”). And the directive for the editor (usually myself), which pseudonymous Georgia (the trafficker dedicated to the Suboxone account) duly wrote on the cover sheet for the item, was often to turn it around quickly/immediately (“ASAP,” she typically wrote). (Additionally, more often than not, she labeled the item as “hot,” which normally—in medical advertising situations I’ve been in—is a rather rare designation. I am not faulting Georgia
Through all this, typically my job was just to see that certain corrections had been entered properly. (The stages of the process that dictated parameters for this will be discussed below.) In no way could it be said there was any latitude for me to exercise fluky or whimsical editorial judgment in this situation. I was mainly a person meant editorially to “see that the screws were tight enough.” Any suggestion that I was (rather broadly) not meeting this expectation—especially in the dense, high-turnover process we were in—shows gross negligence among managers regarding, or audacious denial of, what was going on in my involvement with this account.
It’s a different matter whether I made simple errors, but in that case, there’s another way to fault [Agency X], which will be an essential part of my account (especially in Part 3 of this series of blog entries): most troublingly regarding special, FDA-approved documents, in the last two or more weeks, through August 26, the editorial department, specifically as was Tweedle Dee’s responsibility, was routinely not having a second proofreader read the items I checked within the process I was in, particularly when it was requested specifically on the cover sheets for the items.
Anyway, the client often saw lesser items again to make changes, so errors could well have been caught then (or obviated by replacing the copy they appeared in, entirely).
I. Preliminaries
The typical process of involving an editor in reading an item, and deviations from it in this 2010 case
Typically in medical media agencies, and as generally had been followed at [Agency X] (though this process was getting sloppier at the Ferguson division in 2010, and not just with the Suboxone account), there are different phases of handling of an item, which the agency generally tries to be rigorous and careful about (or at least it has guidelines claiming that it must do this, and delineating the phases):
* the initial draft manuscript stage, which an editor might proofread more than once;
* the initial and subsequent layout stage, where the manuscript is laid out (by an “art [or production] department” worker) into the (roughly speaking) graphic form in which it would be printed, with pictures and/or special typefaces and so on, as decided by various parties—we editors would usually examine the layout for errors in the copy (wordage), as we had done with the manuscript; and
* the “mechanical” stage (mechanical as a term goes back, as I’ll look at further below, to the days when a form of a to-be-printed item, the mechanical, was actually the object that would be printed from—it had pasted-up parts, and at a late production stage, a giant camera would photograph it to make plates for printing purposes).
The mechanical stage in the modern days of computer production of versions of an item to proofread would be, in appearance and in other ways, little different from a layout version, except the understanding was that it was closer to being final, so changes by editors and others would usually be fewer in number and more minor in type.
Lastly, in my earliest days at [Agency X], starting in 2001, it seemed it was the company’s religiously followed practice to have an editor check an item whenever changes to it were made—whether it was (the labeling might vary) L[ayout number] 1 or L 6, or M[echancial] 1 or M 3: that is, the editor was fairly richly woven into the process. But the deviations from this practice that I found at Ferguson
A possible non-technical managerial desideratum: Truncating my time so as not to allow me to collect unemployment after I left [Agency X]
As I go over my evidence from the last two or three weeks I was at Ferguson in August 2010, it becomes increasingly clear that things got especially weird for me in the week of August 23-27, which is also when Tweedle Dum, the trafficking manager and Georgia’s supervisor, came back from vacation (and on Monday, August 23, she said she felt like a “ball of stress”). Why might she have felt such a need to have my time end there that week, even though the Suboxone account was still to be worked on by about August 31, in the next week, and I had helped with a previous account, Valcyte, up to one of its final days earlier in August, without incident?
It is merely speculation on my part—but, all things considered, not a completely outlandish possibility, given the many other deviations from standards in this situation—that Tweedle Dum wanted to cut my time off because, by that week, I would have been with [Agency X] steadily for 15 weeks, and presumably some level of management didn’t want me to get up to 17 weeks of steady work there (maybe they even feared I was already up to 16 weeks), which would have qualified me for unemployment at a future point (namely, if I made a claim in February 2011).
When I wrote my blog entry on Montage Media, I wrote the following passage, but deleted it from this entry. A version of the passage seems useful now:
[I]t should not be surprising to me that, in later years [than when I was at Montage Media in 1996], at a big company, the following thinking may take place on some higher-managerial level. Say a company employs a temporary worker—significantly, this being through its payroll system, meaning that the pay arrangement qualifies the employee for possible future unemployment benefits, and also obviously means that taxes are paid into that system on behalf of the employee. How might the company control costs, in one way? The money-concerned level of management could make a very willful effort to keep that employee working for no longer than about 15 or 16 consecutive weeks in his or her temporary stint. Why?
When you, the worker, apply for unemployment (this is in New Jersey; I don’t know if other states do it differently), and when the unemployment system checks you out to see if you qualify for money benefits and how much—independent of the (important) reason you left a job in the immediate past as your immediate reason for applying—the system uses the following criterion: Within the 12-month period starting 18 months before you apply, you have to have worked at least 17 weeks of “covered work”—meaning, work via which you paid a contribution into the unemployment system.
So, for example, if you were laid off from Employer B in February 2011 (assuming you weren’t disqualified for benefits by the reason your work ended), the unemployment office will look at the period September 2009 through August 2010—the year starting 18 months before your recent job ended. It doesn’t matter if the work within that period was for a different employer (Employer A) than the one you just left in February 2011 (Employer B), which leaving triggered your seeking unemployment. If you had at least 17 weeks of work within that earlier period (at Employer A), you then qualify to get paid unemployment benefits. Further criteria apply: The reason you left a job in February 2011—and how unemployment assesses it—will relate to the determination of whether you get benefits starting about that time; and then the amount of money you get will be based in significant part on the work within the period September 2009 through August 2010. (At least this is my understanding.)
So, say the more recent company (Employer A) abruptly ends your temporary work after you’ve been at it for 15 or 16 weeks. I don’t know what this technically may mean to the (state-applied) “experience rating” of the company or companies you worked at within that earlier period (as far as I know, this rating, if lowering, tends to work against a company, perhaps in raising the amount of unemployment tax required)—for instance, whether your making a claim in February 2011 (on leaving Employer B) will affect the “experience rating” of the earlier company (Employer A) in any way in the state tax department’s eyes. But it would not surprise me if companies that look to see—more as an ad hoc, ongoing matter—how they can decrease their exposure to demands made by laid-off employees on the state-run benefits system, would then consider this sort of thing, because they may want—on the “building-assets” side—to beat 15 or 16 weeks of work out of a poor slob, which incidentally allows the worker to have federal and state taxes taken out to help him at tax time (which is more his concern than theirs). But the companies certainly don’t want—on the “liabilities side”—to have their paying into the unemployment system affected by the worker’s sorry ass making a claim, in February 2011, months after he left them.
II. Significant measures of the Ferguson
Hard statistics on my work in 2010
Here are some hard statistics and other information based on my own informal records, which in 2010 I had to painstakingly go through to do an initial version of part of this story. Some of this, obviously, can be corroborated by the company, because the company accumulates records on time spent on individual accounts as part of its payroll process (and client-billing process), so if it were to deny significant aspects of my information here, it would be engaging in fraud. I will use the present tense though the bulk of this was written in 2010.
During my time with this company in 2010, for days on which I have the information (for some reason, for several days I don’t have information readily at hand), I can derive figures based on the fact that, of whatever number of product-accounts I worked on at least once, there were several I worked on multiple times: this means I could work on several items, from one or more different product-accounts, in whatever combination in a given day. Thus, for each product-account, there would usually be numerous items, each with a separate identifying number.
I’ll admit that my statistics might be a bit off because sometimes I may have worked more than once on an item in a given day, and thus (per my discretion in calculating for this summary) I may have counted it as really one “instance of working on an item/identifying number” when it had been two instances of working on the given item. (Or maybe I counted two in this sort of instance when I should have counted one.)
Anyway, on these separate individually-numbered items, over my entire time at [Agency X] in 2010, I worked 412 times. In other words, say you have five accounts: Products A, B, C, D, and E. For each, there are several different items: master visual aid, sales aid, slim jim, and so on (these are technical terms for different kinds of sales tools, and the array and number of kinds could differ with the products; it doesn’t matter here if you understand exactly what they are). Say, if you considered that the items all are separate: Product A’s master visual aid, slim jim, etc.; Product B’s sales aid, slim jim, etc…. I could work on any combination of these separate items from multiple accounts in given days (though, usually, mainly for practical reasons, I was confined to a certain few accounts over the longer term). The total of such items/instances-of-work that I handled over my whole time at [Agency X] in 2010 was 412.
Now in looking at my daily work, let me make special use of a homemade term for the next several sentences, for convenience. By specific item, I mean a separate item—a sales aid, a brochure, a print ad—for which, typically, as I described above, a separate account number was established. So, for 46 days from which these figures derive, my “412” averages to about 9 specific items per day. (This should mean—again, with the possibility of error as noted above—that I am not counting the exact same thing twice, if I worked on it two different times in a day.)
Even in my last week at [Agency X] in August 2010, when some higher-ups may have wondered what my value was there (director of editorial services Tweedle Dee indeed did some hand-wringing commenting as if there was a problem, which concern probably originated [unrealistically] from trafficking manager Tweedle Dum, about how to account for my idle time—which I assured him, as I had before, was not a problem): in my last week, I worked on a slightly higher-than-average number of specific items per day: about 10. And this included the big P.I.s (which I will talk about in Parts 2 and 3 of this series of entries), which typically took, a piece, well over an hour to do, and up to more than two hours for a given iteration. Even on my very last day, I worked on no fewer than 10 specific items, within almost a three-hour period—including several Suboxone items.
I worked on Suboxone items in my earliest weeks there in the summer—certainly in early June, and quite likely in late May. And when you consider how I became the editor dedicated (by Tweedle Dee) to Suboxone by mid-July, and there were three main product-accounts we editors in the editorial department of Ferguson all worked on (along with several other accounts that had items come through much more rarely), you can roughly estimate that I saw Suboxone items (whatever amount there was of specific identifying numbers) roughly 140 or more times. This had to be more for Suboxone than for any other hands-on editor there. And even if you arbitrarily cut this number by about 33 percent, and thus you estimate I saw Suboxone items 100 times, that is still quite a number, which puts how I was handled in my last week there in question-raising perspective: on what grounds, if not my work record and competence in the account, was I handled as I was (as if I was of supposedly little value to Suboxone), even if a possible defamatory August 26/27 alert alert about me is left out of consideration?
(Just to be clear, from now on, when I say account, I mean just a specific product, for which there may be many “specific item” numbers.)
Work divided up between different editors, and idiosyncrasies came into play
By June 11, before it was clear who was the preferred Suboxone editor (myself) and before it was quite evident how there was a peculiar way that Suboxone style rules kept changing, an issue came up where ES, a freelance editor whom Tweedle Dee had begin a stint shortly after I started working there regularly in May-June (she had also worked there earlier but was absent in my first days or weeks there), raised a fuss over how a Suboxone item had been edited (it had been a piece, I believe, I had worked on). I have no idea what she fussed over at this point, and it is telling about Tweedle Dee’s management style that he never told me, for the sake of the product.
This fussing of ES’s was a key point regarding which, after my considerable anxiety and anger in private moments in response to her prodigious fussing, I raised with Tweedle Dee my objection to her working methods (which I considered selfish, in essence). Per a specific request of mine, Tweedle Dee tried to schedule us not to work together on the same day, which ended up being for a short time. (There is more on her in Part 3, subsections I and II.)
ES, in my opinion, was impractically perfectionistic, and hyperopinionated in the way of a coworker who undermines your standing for no other reason than her difference of opinion about mere preferences for how to work there. (She had previously worked at a competitor company and apparently only recently had started working at [Agency X].) She also had the rude habit of whispering in a none-too-subtle way when she wanted to talk to others in the cramped cubicle hall we were in about something she apparently didn’t want you to hear, for whatever reason.
This, among other behaviors (including something I referenced to the several recipients of my letter of resignation of August 27), led me to firmly consider her an eccentric; but I was willing to live and let live with her, though I don’t think she took quite so liberal an attitude with me. Suffice it to say that as the months went on, we worked in an uneasy peace, and Tweedle Dee had the wisdom to have us generally work on separate accounts, which is partly why, by mid-July, I became the preferred editor for Suboxone.
Now let me turn to a technical discussion, so you understand what it means to deal with multiple versions of a “layout” form of an item and multiple versions of a “mechanical” form. (Yes, there is this set of complexities, to go along with the types of items like “master visual aid,” “slim jim,” etc. You definitely learned the ropes and got used to the idiosyncrasies of the industry.) Some of this will be very important for understanding what went wrong with federally-approved items I proofread in the week of August 23-27.
Seeing multiple versions of items in medical media: Different kinds of challenges
Here is another example of the type of thing you also see in medical advertising, to indicate something else of the typical kinds of conditions that shape your development as a proofreader. Medical advertising frequently—and this generally can been seen in other types of media, too—has items pass through multiple versions, as changes are made to the items by editors, or at client behest, or for other reasons.
Also, as is more peculiar to medical advertising (and as I said in subsection I), there are two general versions of an item before it is finally designated ready to go to the printer, or whatever its final stage is. There is the “layout” version and the “mechanical” version.
As many young handlers of this material might not know—they adapt to these terms as industry jargon without knowing quite where they came from, in the pre-electronic era—these terms are holdovers from when print items, in production, were made in paste-up form (and the terms might even have been used when hot type and such were standard printing methods, though I don’t have direct experience of that). In the paste-up era (which I experienced at newspapers), you could have an item designed on paper by an artist—with things drawn and written by hand, and typed content maybe prepared in some preliminary form or otherwise provided space for. This version of the item was—using terms that might be more familiar—a sort of “rough draft” or “dummy” of an ad, a brochure, or whatever. In the old days of the advertising industry in particular (which I was new to in 2001 and haven’t fully learned all the quirks of as I have other areas of the media), this “dummy”-ish version may have been what was called a “layout” version. Whatever the specific technical qualities/parameters of a “layout” version in the old days, it was definitely more rudimentary than, and always preceded, a “mechanical” version.
In the paste-up era, after the dummy-ish/earlier version, an item reached a form where it was definitely in paste-up form: there was typeset copy (words), and inked or otherwise “art department”-produced material (art, graphics, etc.), and this was put on what was called a mechanical, a flat item meant to be amenable to eventually making print plates from. (This latter process normally meant that a large camera would photograph the mechanical and this would yield a giant piece of film from which a printing plate would be made in another process.) (I am describing this from what I learned when I did in paste-up as my job at a newspaper in 1988.)
Presumably (certainly as was implied in the electronic-era work I was involved in), there could be changes by editors, or whoever else, either in the rough-draft or dummy form, or in the mechanical form. The mechanical form, of course, meant that an item was closer to being approved for going to the printer.
When paste-up as a method was superseded by things being laid out—with type, art, whatever else—electronically, with everything printed out in one paper copy, there was no longer the complexity of a more-or-less haphazard-looking, low-tech layout version or a more high-tech-looking mechanical. But for whatever reason, in the industry, the terms layout version and mechanical version were retained, even though to look at such versions cursorily, they looked (about) the same (while there might often happen to be more errors, or crudeness, in the layout version).
There were, I think, reasons for the use of the two versions/conceptualizations on the production end—meaning, management of the production of these different versions where the values followed were those of the art/“production” department (and here, a mainly visual, global look, as well as other technical aspects of the visual side of things, shaped what got done with an item). This, at least implicitly, could also conform with values of “pre-flight” personnel (pre-flight may never have been a term used at [Agency X]), meaning personnel who prepared an item immediately prior to it being sent to a printer for actual printing into multiple copies.
Though this explanation of “production” may be a little crude in terms of what the process typically entails, I describe it this way to distinguish it from what editors and proofreaders typically do in their nerdily word-oriented way, which also very typically has meant that we editors work within the metes and bounds of how an item is handled that are primarily determined by the production team and its prerogatives, not per anything editorial might prefer to do.
So, even though an item in layout form may look not different from how it is in mechanical form, when something is in mechanical form, there is more of a sense it is readier for being final; therefore your proofreading task—and your needing to be on your game, catching all errors—is more urgent. This generally reflects the typical relevant attitudes.
The type of quirky issue I meant to describe is this. It’s one thing to proofread a new version—either in layout form or in mechanical form—against a previous version to see that all corrections are in, which is a typical medical-media task that, as I said, is very circumscribed, limiting how much “judgment,” “whim,” or whatever you might employ. (The jargon for the task of checking to see that specifically designated corrections are in, which I’ve only heard in the medical advertising industry, is “check changes”—which is said either in a verb form or in a noun-phrase form. E.g., “Oh, this is just a check changes.”)
Further, as had certainly been a typical way of doing things several years ago, you proofread (for example) “L 4” (layout iteration number 4) against “L 3,” or “M 4” (mechanical iteration number 4) against “M 3.” Sometimes the request at hand just required one proofreader to “check changes” in L 3 against L 2. At the mechanical stage, especially if something is in the this-is-important “final mechanical” stage, it will require two proofreaders, one reading after the other. If so, this makes all the sense in the world.
Two types of oddities started to crop up in my latest years of working for medical media (not only, I believe, at [Agency X]). One is that—in the ways that there tends to be an antagonism between higher-ups (account reps, others of a managerial ilk) and editors—editors are bypassed for one or more “layout versions” of an item, because of haste that is seen as needed for expediency in handling something. Or this may be done because of some other (not necessarily laudable) motivation. Then, when a “job jacket” (a large folder as may be used by a medical-media firm containing current and previous versions of an item, instruction sheets for how to handle an item, etc.) comes containing work for you to do, there isn’t just the latest version to proofread and the immediately previous one to proofread against, but you may find that the item has not been proofread—to “check changes”—against an immediately previous version, or against a just-further-back version—maybe not for three, four, or more previous versions…. So then, following good judgment, you “check changes” in the latest version against the previous, and check that previous one against the one before it if it had not been subject to “check changes”…and on as far back as when an editor was last involved. This is to see that all corrections made in subsequent versions have been carried forward.
If it was routine within a company division or department that you had to “check changes” against multiple previous versions—and this happened with several items—this suggests one of a few things. Either (1) the management, in the name of “responding quickly to client demands” and/or “not wanting to be bogged down with handling by several levels of professionals offering input (editor, writer, production person) while time is of the essence,” made it a new de facto (unwritten) policy to skip editorial handling once or more than once, or (2) the head of the editorial department was not exerting enough control to prevent this kind of expedient (or careless) practice.
What are the kinds of problems that can arise from this? Obviously, if a change was made in a far-back layout version and it was never caught by an editor, it could survive through many versions until the current one. This sort of thing I found in the Suboxone account. By late May or early June, I found (actually, another staffer had found) no less than a misspelled representation of a medication’s generic name on an item. But as the staffer hadn’t found, I discovered that the erroneous spelling was present, say, way back on L 2, and originally I was proofreading L 7 or such; so the error had survived from L 2 through L 7 (before I’d ever been involved in the item), because no editor was used to read for this sort of thing through those stages. That is, the editorial department had been decisively bypassed through those stages (though you might not infer the exact reason).
So, more generally at various firms I’d been at but definitely with the Suboxone account here at Ferguson, sometimes per my experience-based discretion, if an editor had been left out of looking at several versions, I not only opted to proofread L 7 against L 6, which was ostensibly the main task (requested by a higher-up), but I read L 6 against L 5, L 5 against L 4, and so on, to see that all corrections marked in previous versions were carried to subsequent versions, so the errors were corrected.
The notable peculiarities of procedure in the Suboxone account
About the time ES fussed over a Suboxone item I had worked on in early June, I was already becoming aware of the typical problems of the Suboxone items. Suboxone as a brand had been handled by different divisions of [Agency X] for years. I found in 2010 that a company-printed timesheet for my work in another division in spring 2007 showed that I worked on a consumer type of Suboxone item, for a substantial amount of time.
We’ve already seen the problem of a missed misspelling of a product’s generic name. By the way, as I said at the start of this entry, the form of Suboxone we were doing promotional materials for was the new film version, to be approved by the FDA on August 30 or 31. The tablet form had already been approved and was in use for some years. In fact, it was problems of (per client wording) “misuse, abuse, and diversion” that had plagued legitimate use of tablet-form Suboxone, or a simpler medication using buprenorphine, Subutex, that seemed to be behind the client’s close attention to content for the promotional materials for the film version that would help shape the oddness of how these materials were edited (and on a level quite apart from mine).
Various media products for Suboxone, in its tablet form, had been worked on by the Ferguson
Thus, with Georgia newly made the trafficker for this account in or shortly after April 2010, and with me brought on more regularly in May 2010, suddenly in later spring 2010 these half-baked items for the film form of the Suboxone drug were coming through, with instructions just to “check changes,” when actually they most definitely needed more than that (this was whether or not “check changes” was requested in writing on the cover sheet by Georgia, and if it was, it was at the request of a higher-up; typically in these early days, or even later [I think], Georgia didn’t take the initiative [I don’t think] in formulating certain specific measures to be taken by editors with items, whether the measures were realistic or not).
I had a lengthy discussion with Tweedle Dee about this whole matter in mid-June, and he admitted that no full style guide had been made for Suboxone in general (either tablet or film) (a style guide for a product account is a med-advertising staple). In fact, by and large, he had no printed style guides for any specific products in his department, which was to my mind a significant departure from [Agency X's] professional methods of the past. The company had instituted, as part of its intranet, a setup called “Common Knowledge”—maintained in a central database, and accessed by employees who had the passwords or such to do so—that included, among other things, electronic forms of style sheets. This might have been a very useful tool, but whatever its virtues in practice, I found that the Suboxone style sheet there was quite a bit out of date. The last work on it had been in 2009, I believe, and just a cursory read showed how rudimentary it was. It essentially was not worth using.
Moreover, at this point Tweedle Dee showed that he had a sort of hands-off attitude toward the Suboxone account in general (as he would show again, hardly subtly, more than once).
Not least with regard to ES’s fussing over the editing of a Suboxone item in mid-June, ES’s more general problem was, as far as I’m concerned, that she thought every item should be made perfect each time you get it, which was not only unrealistic in the context of the usual practices of this editorial department of the Ferguson division, but is generally unrealistic through all medical-editing situations I’ve been in. It was her staunch fussing on the item in early June, in line with this perfectionism, that abruptly heralded an alienation between us that, in essence, would remain to the end of my time there (and which I accepted readily enough, as healthy from my point of view).
As far as the idiosyncrasies of the Suboxone account are concerned, there was nothing unrealistic about my assumptions about how to handle the erratic Suboxone pieces. Indeed, just when you ironed out what seemed all the bugs in pieces, many detailed changes would be demanded by the client again, throughout the summer and well into August. This shaped my role as an editor for the account of just checking to see if all new, ad hoc changes were entered; there was no such thing as an item being perfect whenever you got done with it. (This accorded with one specific item, on August 18, being handled per such specific client demands that Georgia went to an unusual length to point out, bit by bit with her being closely interwoven into my physical space in my cubicle, which previously marked changes were allowed to be made and which weren’t.)
And in August, a rather large item came through, the most cavalierly handled item in months (and, again, not Georgia’s fault), for which a mere “check changes” or such was requested, as if it was virtually ready to go to the printer; but actually it had some fundamental problems such as that (1) placeholders were in the positions of brand-name mentions; and (2) wordage associated with the brand-name mentions in places had to change also, because of the adoptions of certain key phrasings and mannerisms that the sales items were taking on as the summer proceeded. Thus, that particular item duly went through for big changes in line with what I found, not merely a “check changes” or the like as if it was ready to go to the printer.
The foregoing shows how things shaped up with Suboxone in the first half of my summer 2010 stint at [Agency X]. As I’ve said, Georgia
Some of the starkest peculiarities of how the Suboxone account was handled will be looked at later, especially in the next entry of this series.
Along with my busy work on a somewhat neglected account, Tweedle Dee pursues an agenda of beefing up a more regular staff including freelancers (and not including me)
Amid all this, Tweedle Dee was slowly building what would appear to be a more regular set of freelance editors, which would not include me—not an especially offensive agenda in itself. ES’s being brought in in June was the start of this. Another, staff editor, J. McC., had been brought in from another division and was made a permanent fixture in the department by late July or so. (As recently as late April, Tweedle Dee was the only permanent editor there after one longtime [Agency X] veteran, the woman who I said commented Georgia
By the week of July 12-16, I found that I had more idle time there on average than before, which not only ate into my time for other priorities in my life, but made for a bit of a tricky way to figure out how to bill at [Agency X], though this latter wasn’t impossible to do, and I explained to Tweedle Dee how I handled this, as was fair to [Agency X]. (For details on the more typical ways I had developed, over years, how to handle idle time vis-à-vis billing, see this entry.) From then on, my idle time, differently from May and June into early July, would be built up because of the extra editors Tweedle Dee had brought in, including ES and J. McC.
Things only got farcical when EW, a former work associate of ES’s whom she had recommended to Tweedle Dee, was brought in about August 6. EW, an odd sort given to occasional vocal mannerisms and an occasional odd look about his eyes, was a fellow church parishioner of ES’s, and had been a supervisor at the medical ad agency they’d both worked at before.
EW seemed to miss being a supervisor; newly in Ferguson
Most notably, EW was not a proofreading-type editor. He didn’t know proofreading marks. He didn’t seem to read that closely, or if he did, he didn’t find many errors; stuff he read (I have in mind, in particular, a PowerPoint slide deck he worked on) typically didn’t have many marks on them—not as with ES, with her infinite fussing. But when EW did make marks, they could just as readily be non-standard (in terms of proofreading methods) as not. Once he circled something and wrote, “FIX”—which even a layperson, I think, can see as at least a bit ridiculous for its crudity. He is the editor who drew my strongest scorn in terms of everyday work, and how he figured into the politics in my last days there is absurd and sad.
III. Start of a narrative: The week of August 16-21
Almost immediately after I left [Agency X] on August 27, as is my instinct to do in such violent situations, I started to write a set of journal entries on everything I could remember or otherwise had records of that could pertain to accounting for what happened there, as related to me. I wrote handwritten journal entries, and eventually (first finishing a key section in early September 2010) an initial essay of sorts that I shared at least parts of with trusted associates for their feedback. Other versions of my account of what happened there—started separately over many months—were worked on to different purposes.
I have looked over the accounts again and again. I have looked at the actual evidence (copies of documents, printouts from the Internet, etc.) repeatedly. I have wondered if I really interpreted some actions or comments correctly. And how important was the breakdown in professional standards?
It was very clear that some things were subtle, and the sorts of things that I’d come to learn were not what local practicing attorneys (who are typically not versed in the office politics of media companies) would really understand, much less want to handle in a case.
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My first narrative here is the week immediately preceding the crazy week. It will be selective, in part to conform with what I noted regarding Georgia that some things I deemed not relevant to the larger issues at hand would not be focused on (i.e., not much; there will be exceptions); see “Storm getting closer, Part 2 of 3: One limitation on my medical-media biopsy: Keeping a ‘seal’ on info on one person,” here. In some ways the week recounted just below will seem pretty unremarkable, and in a way this makes sense: the nature of the storm that would happen in August 23-27 would not quite be presaged by the week of August 16-21. But it also shows that for Tweedle Dum to circulate her alert about me on August 26/27 reflected a definite disconnection on her part from reality.
On Monday, August 16, Georgia and I interacted well enough at 10:15. By about 3:45, she had an item that was ready to be “disk-released” (in a big satchel such as, typically, carried the most recent iteration of an item, as well as past iterations and other papers—the Suboxone account had enormous such “job jackets”). She left it on Tweedle Dee’s chair for him to do a final read on (which normally would have been the expected practice). When he came back from wherever he seemed to so frequently disappear to (whether a meeting or not), he decisively removed the satchel of material and put it aside. He definitely wasn’t going to work on it.
Seeing this, I went ahead and proofread the item (gave it a “final” proofreading) myself, knowing Georgia Georgia Georgia
At about 10:35 (earlier than the above situation), EW was with Georgia about something regarding the Suboxone Web site material, and—as I’d been finding he engaged in various quirks—had a rattle-related weird way of talking.
On Tuesday, August 17, EW—who had, to me presumptuously, established an e-mail-type rapport on August 10 with another trafficker, “Kayla,” which I would generally not have done with the traffickers and certainly not in my first week there (meaning, in 2001—the first time I was ever at [Agency X])—advised Georgia on something about being “part of the team”!! This ass, just there a little over a week, advising Georgia
At some point on Tuesday, Georgia Georgia
The particular style-rule matter on which Georgia
Next thing you know, the client dropped the rule about the initial-lowercase f and wanted it initial-cap’d whenever it was presented as a sort of key phrase referring to the product, whether it appeared in subheads or in typical text of an item. So more rigorous proofreading got done to insure the new style rule was followed. I recall there was an issue regarding when the generic use of film was used—initial-cap or not? I think the decision here was lowercase (again, a not-implausible rule; for instance, imagine an ad with references to “Quaker Oats” and then, with generic mentions, oats is initial-lowercase).
Now in the instance where I pointed out an inconsistency to Georgia Georgia
This is also an example of what I meant in an earlier blog entry by this, which may seem a bit tough-minded by the standards of the present blog entry:
In some ways I felt Georgia was…immature for the role…and in other ways I felt badly for Georgia, or had the grounds to, because while she was trying her best, the situation was unfair for the position she was in, even for someone more experienced than she. It was as if she had to skate in a rough-and-tumble roller rink and had never skated before, plus I had to be her ad hoc partner and work in coordination with her while I had her deficiencies to deal with, as well as the fact that, metaphorically speaking, and independent of our own wills, the floor was jumping around beneath us in a way not typical of roller rinks. [boldface added]
On Wednesday, August 18, Georgia (as I said earlier) leaned in toward me closely as she pointed out which of a host of specific items on a Suboxone piece (a “med guide,” I believe it was) were to be changed, as opposed to those editorially marked that were not to be changed. I mention this physical posture of hers to suggest the sort of thing she did as a young woman—she not meaning anything devious—that could have been misinterpreted by onlookers (especially those lacking in common sense about what was going on between us, a lack of common sense that would be more evident among others the following week). (I also saw how she tended to stand closely to other people.) (For a literary example of this kind of "standing close" by a young woman who may, for a host of reasons apart from her initially indiscreetly standing close, pose significant social issues later, see Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001], pp. 36-37 [especially], 42-51, and 78.)
I also noticed that day that Evelyn R. and Denise G., two staffers involved with the Suboxone account in some way, had an unusual way of looking at me, as if they were clued to something newly (and of a personal kind) of significance about my role there. (I leave this vague. But I’m showing the arcane, hermetic oddities that were going on, as will become far more distinct and readable the next week. These two women, I believe, were “meaningful toward me in a new way” as I felt was spurred by Georgia Georgia
I was not in on Thursday, August 19. I wasn’t needed.
On Friday, August 20, I found my computer was loused up. I found that EW had been using it the day before, and he had done something that had so loused it up that I needed to get someone from the IT department to help iron it out. I found from Tweedle Dee, who seemed a bit aloof and weaselly about the issue, that indeed EW had been working there (Thursday), and he was aware the computer was screwed up, but didn’t seem terribly alarmed about it, certainly not for my sake.
I had decent enough exchanges with Georgia Georgia Georgia
There was some idea I might come in Saturday. But I wasn’t told yet (by Tweedle Dee) before it was time to leave; I found that I would be told by e-mail (I believe that was the only avenue of contact I was to expect) later on.
As I mentioned near the end of my October 22 entry, things had gotten crazy enough that my time was so micromanaged, even while high-pressure stuff was being dealt with, that I could only hear about the need to come in at the very last minute.
I found the e-mail very early in the morning of August 21, then couldn’t get back to sleep. I went in to work after only about three and a quarter hours’ sleep—much too short for me to do usually-good work. (Speaking off the top of my head, I can function fairly well on between five and six hours’ sleep; and on as low as four-plus hours, I can do OK for a day or so, but anything below four for a workday is bad news. I am not saying I am Superman with functioning on short sleep; it has been a practical condition I have dealt with for over 20 years, and my usual average is six and a half hours of sleep a day, which wasn’t the usual case before summer 1991, when I became full-time at All American Crafts. This general condition of my sleep is one of the most significant unusual health correlates of my experience of the peculiarly demanding world of publishing and other media—and it sensitively and reliably responds to exterior stressors; it is what in psychological academia is called an “independent predictor”—in my case, a variable that can reliably be seen correlating with other factors, specifically to previous stressors and my subsequent degraded functioning. That industry does have a day-by-day effect on your health, just as politics and other high-demand, publicly oriented careers do—think of movie stars and their lives of sporadic work and weeks or months on a shoot with super-long days [Bill Murray, Ridley Scott, and others have talked about how physically demanding it is]. Over the long term, I think publishing has taken a cumulative toll on my health, a thing to keep in mind in terms of changing careers. But that’s not a discussion for here.)
For Saturday, I had Suboxone brochures to proofread (not med guides, I believe, which were also to come); these brochures were coming in to Ferguson from the client in Word-doc form (and I believe were to be initially read and maybe tweaked by writers on Ferguson Ferguson
I struggled through about two and three-quarters hours’ work…and I was finding one or two little errors in the documents—such things as a missing comma that would have helped understanding of wordage better—and (after such an issue was referred, via probably our project worker KK, in the Lizard room to the client via speakerphone) the client seemed to object (as I heard through KK or another account worker on our end). I don’t recall if the objection was on the idea that we should not be changing the copy (as it was already “FDA approved”), but (and not necessarily that this was due to a specific work move of mine) all the sudden the client pulled the project for the day. The client would deal further with the items (in Word doc form) on its own before it had us deal with them again in a day or so (and we were only to deal with them editorially after we’d laid them out, probably Monday).
In all my experience of medical-advertising work over close to a decade, I hadn’t seen such an odd process in terms of a client having a group of us in for a Saturday, about a week from the project deadline, to deal with some FDA-approved documents that, on their face, were fairly simple, and then when we started proofreading them as requested, suddenly there was a grand pulling of the task. Worse would happen of this general ilk the next week, and it would involve more highly sensitive FDA-approved documents, and the big missteps would be on our end.
The day was done, after I’d been there about three hours. It was like a wasted day (though I was obviously still going to get paid). The women managers in the Lizard room were going to go home, too, I think. How stupid the situation was.
As I would look back, the crazy week had started on this day.
