I had a charming morning, starting when I checked my flight status this morning to discover that my flight to Houston was cancelled. This was not good, since I have a 1 pm flight to LA for the con shrift is missing due to a funeral, and that I almost missed because of a funeral. The wait time to talk to a person was 40 minutes, so I headed to the airport, working out scenarios in my head.

The agent tells me, "You've been rebooked on the 9:26 flight." Which was my original flight. They just got a new plane and a new flight number.

So I am safely in the Houston airport, eating lunch. I'm glad it worked out, but I wish they'd spared me the heart attack.

two day turnaround

IEEE also has a two-day proof turnaround for most of our journals. I think it's unreasonably short too, and it's ridiculous that it doesn't take business days into account. But I have the luxury of being able to mostly ignore it -- just get me the proof back the day before the scheduled online-posting date, and I don't care. I'm usually able to give them at least a week in actual practice. I'll only go to a co-author to review the article if the corresponding author fails to communicate with me. If they don't get it back to me in time, I get to enter a Reason For Delay in the database, and as long as that reason is not me (spoiler: it's never me), no one else really cares either. They're not tracking whether it got back in two days, they're tracking whether it posted on schedule. The higher-ups know that 2 days is too tight, they know no one can control what the authors do, and they're mainly concerned with being able to say "it wasn't our fault!".

I keep singing Graceland with altered lyrics - "we're going to Iceland, Iceland, Reykjavik city, we're going to Iceland [doodle-doodle deedle-deedle-dum bom bom] Amsterdam's on the way, and then there's an eclipse and we're in Iceland"

Love it!

In snow news, my sister is stuck in the San Antonio airport. She was supposed to fly home today, now she probably won't get out of there until 6am tomorrow. She says it's like The Terminal only everyone is Tom Hanks.

Hey, today makes two years at this job (including the time spent temping). Time flies. And I'm not all fed up with it and looking to go somewhere else, yet, so that's nice.

They're not tracking whether it got back in two days, they're tracking whether it posted on schedule. The higher-ups know that 2 days is too tight, they know no one can control what the authors do, and they're mainly concerned with being able to say "it wasn't our fault!".

That's basically how the AMA rolls, too, from what I understand. They track how long an article is out, but as long as it gets posted on schedule, it's all good.

But you can't give authors a week, because then they'll take 10-14 days. If you give them 2 days, you stand a good chance of getting it back within 4. (Plus, the 2 days also works for authors who return their article on time but don't answer half the queries, so we can't do anything with the article until they just do what we asked them to do in the first place, and the process of getting them to just answer the fucking questions about why their percentages are all incorrect ends up putting us back at 4 days.)

It's the publishing equivalent of telling your chronically late husband we need to be at the party at 2:00, when it's really 3:00. Not that I would know anything about consistently lying about the time of an event to my husband. For 9 years.

Argh. And since I complained about the one project here? The other project has now gone all to hell. I really am so fed up with this shit.

But you can't give authors a week, because then they'll take 10-14 days. If you give them 2 days, you stand a good chance of getting it back within 4.

Exactly. Most authors do turn it around quickly. Some of them ask for more time, and then I look all helpful and easy to work with when I say "Sure, have two extra days!" (My boss likes it when we get positive feedback from authors. I make sure she knows it when I do!) It's the ones who just don't respond that are the problem childs. I had one guy who was handling all the papers for a Special Conference Issue who just dropped off the face of the earth. He got tired of doing it, so he just...stopped. The issue was delayed two months until finally someone else took over. The next year, he volunteered again, and yep -- he did the same thing again. But, hey, he still got to put it on his CV that he'd been a Guest Editor for two Special Issues of the journal. And that's what really matters, right?

I just talked with my dad, giving him an update on the non-progress on the pre-approval. In our discussion, he came up with another idea for helping the process. He had college funds set-up for both kids. K-Bug's covered her first year of school. His thought was that since CJ is going to a Community College and living at home, maybe I can negotiate "dorm cost" with CJ to have some cash on hand from his fund. CJ doesn't know this is out there (I had assumed, but dad hadn't said anything specifically until today). He is going to check on how much is in the account and the process to transfer control to CJ. No clue how amenable CJ would be to this, but hey - you want to live at home while going to school? You can contribute. I like the concept.

both of us - fold and put away clothes from drying racks - halfway done, waiting for rest to dry
me - vacuum front room - carpet and furniture (damn animals)
me - use up as much of the perishable food as I can (lunch will be a big salad and left over chicken, guac for mac?, baked potatoes for dinner?, sautéed greens for me) 2 egg scrambles done and all breakfast sausage cooked
both of us - vacuum respective bedrooms, put away clothes - mac did his
both of us - pack - mac has laid out his clothes for me to check
me - litter boxes
mac - vacuum furniture in backroom
me - DEAL WITH THE PAPER EVERYWHERE
me - upload medical bills to fsa
me - start taxes? (honestly probably not)
me - check all bills to make sure are paid
me - food scraps to compost.

some progess.

showered, dressed, food et. second cup of coffee. On to one of the tasks.

And my fussing killed the thread, sorry.

So...what's for lunch?