the cat nation idea was pretty great.
That was the only part of that post I liked. I mean, I'm glad Matthew Inman's family was safe, and he's a resilient person, but -- yeah, pretty much the whole thing was really upsetting. But I would have read it if I were on The Oatmeal's page (versus it being linked here, is what I mean), so I'm not upset it was linked here or anything.
ION, we are all ready to kill an author. We are literally a month behind schedule. Our process is to edit an article, typeset it, proofread it, correct it, and then send a galley proof to the author. Cumulatively, we can spend upwards of 12-15 hours on some really complicated articles before a galley ever goes to the author.
So, we sent a galley of one of these big, time-consuming articles to the author, and he sent back a NEW WORD DOCUMENT, saying "our team converted the wrong version" of his manuscript and we needed to use the attached document and send him a new galley right away. (Note: we only ever had ONE manuscript. We didn't have several, with different dates on them, and picked the wrong one. We had ONE. Which is what we used.)
Yeah, no. You send a NEW document, we have to re-edit it, re-typeset it, re-proof it, and re-correct it before it can ever go back out. Essentially, we have to treat it as a totally new article. So all the time we spent on it -- remember, we are a month behind schedule -- was wasted.
Fortunately, the proper official response to this author is actually along the lines of, Hey, this is not how things are done. If you would like us to use your new manuscript, it will get treated as a new article and will be re-scheduled for several months from now. Also, piss off.
Possibly that last sentence will not be included.