I’m free.
Yes.
I quit. I’m gone. Out the door, never to return. A bird that has flown the coop.
Last night, after I finally finished the latest iteration of the Index from the Black Lagoon, I mailed the damn thing off with an e-mail to our client editor letting him know I’m taking my 350 unused vacation hours, starting TODAY. That will carry me through to the end of the month, all the way to Canning Day.
And what a fine send-off that was! It was the worst episode of overwork I’ve been through since the days of La Morona, a.k.a. My Bartleby. Truly. I’ve been working from 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning deep into the evening, literally until I could not work any more, every day for the past four or five days. Those are eighteen-hour days. Most of that time was spent writing an index—truly a brain-numbing job—and undoing a screw-up of Herculean proportions in (naturally!) an essay that is long enough to stand as a monograph in its own right.
Yes, on top of the screwed-up index that had to be rebuilt almost from scratch, someone took it into his or her mind to set acres of direct quotation in italic. Why? Because it’s in Latin. We italicize foreign languages. Don’t we?
Well, no. Not always. Not in this case.
The flicking article occupies 148 typeset pages.
When our client editor saw the page proofs, he realized something looked odd but didn’t realize the author had it right in the first place: set roman. His response was to ask that we remove all the quotation marks.
After I had gone through 148 pages marking hundreds of deletions, I realized that couldn’t possibly be right: the guy was indicating direct quotes from primary sources. Belatedly, I drag out Chicago and find all that Latin material should have been set in roman type. That’s when, ever so much more belatedly, it occurs to me to check the original MS, where I found that Author had it right, and someone on our end—probably the new editor in the sponsor’s office—changed it.
So now I had to go back through the 148 brain-boggling pages, STET all the quotes, and mark all the italic roman.
You can imagine how pleased our graphic designer was when I showed up at his door and dumped this mess on his desk. Ours was the third fiasco to enter his life that morning, and I presented myself at around 9:30. He grabbed the great wad of paper, waved it in the air, and demanded to know “Whose idea is it to publish a book as an article???!??”
Not mine, of that you can be sure.
From there it was on to the index, 33 endless pages of entries and subentries parsing the most arcane subject matter you can imagine.
I really don’t enjoy indexing. This particular annual is difficult to index, because it not only is arcane, it’s dense. Every page has three or four entries, at least. By the time we reach the indexing stage, I’ve read the copy, which can be excruciatingly detailed, several times. And I Do. Not. Want. To. Read. It. Again. So I have to force myself to do this job, which under the best of circumstances takes about five to seven days.
Stupefied with short-termer’s syndrome, I plotted to foist about half the job onto my R.A. The book consists of discrete articles, and so I gave her several that did not overlap (so I thought) with the ones I kept for myself to work on. She wrote her entries; I wrote mine; then I merged the files.
Bad mistake.
First, the two chunks of copy in fact did have some overlapping content. In some cases, we described that content in different terms, so a subject was indexed in two places under two descriptive headings. And second, this young Ph.D. knows next to nothing about Renaissance and medieval history. This makes it difficult to recognize the names of major figures. Or, for that matter, some of the currents of thought and controversy that were BFDs then, but are lost and long forgotten today.
And finally, the aging editor forgets that young people conceive and map out research strategies differently from the way those of us who came up with hard copy do. They think in Boolean terms. A search is something that you do in Google or in a library database, not in an index or a drawer full of index cards. While there are some similarities, there are also some fundamental differences. And those differences are HUGE. The result: an index designed by a younger mind looks different and is different from one built by a survivor of the Cretaceous.
Ultimately, the only help for it was to throw out everything the kid did and start over. Basically, I ended up doing all the work I should’ve done in the first place, and then some. Quite a lot of some.
When I finally hit “Send” about 7:30 last night and realized it was the last thing I’ll ever have to do for GDU, it felt like a loud shrieking squeal had suddenly stopped.
You know how it feels when a migraine ends? Your head doesn’t hurt any more, but there’s a kind of residual echo of the pain? Like that.
My office is empty. Sometime between now and the 31st, I’ll have to go back to campus to return the College’s laptop and turn in the keys. Probably there’ll be one more frustrating runaround with HR. And that is it.
I hope never to have to set foot on the campus of the Great Desert University again.
Image:
Toby Hudson, Domestic Rock Pigeons in Flight, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0