Passing The Test

I meant to tell this story at the end of June because that’s when it happened but I was so worn out by the end of that week of June that I just couldn’t do it. Gather ’round children, it’s story time.

At work there is an unspoken rule that you do not involve the editors until you absolutely have to involve them because they have been known to get creative with the text instead of just making sure the commas are correct and we’re not infringing on copyrights. I may omit commas on occasion but I have found many a mis-spelled word in courses I’ve read. So, I’m a little confused about what editor really means.

One of the managers sent a course she and I were working on over to the editors and the person who thinks she’s the head editor said she needed to have a meeting with us to discuss. I had run into this person before and she’s one of those people that talks to you as if you’ve been party to the conversation in her head. And, she threw some techno-speak around that was just plain wrong.

At the meeting she talked to us about whatever it was that she needed to talk to us about and I really don’t remember what that was because I had just walked back in the door after being gone all week and I was fried (observing a pilot course and paying attention for every minute of the day is taxing). She went back to my desk with me so we could discuss the subject of turning MS Word documents into PDF. Yeah, we had to discuss that. If you don’t know, you take your document and then you print to the PDF printer and amazingly enough you end up with a PDF (portable document format). Now, I don’t know about you, but printing a document is pretty damn easy.

I offered that I had been using Acrobat Professional for years and I was pretty OK with the whole package. She nodded and then looked up at my wall. I have three small Edward Gorey prints. She told me she loves Gorey and has been known to send out Gorey Christmas cards. I told her about my favorite Gorey Christmas card and then she left. Just like that. She later told the manager that she had every confidence in me to take care of the process. The manager said I passed the test. I think I passed the test based solely on the Gorey connection.