Grassing people up to their boss

[Brown and Boris]

I always tried to avoid it if I can because it causes problems in the longer term but some people probably need the foot up their ar5e.

Today a publications manager sent me some corrections for a template I had written ove the summer, changing stuff she had seen and proof read a month ago and not marked as needing changing. I had made the changes she had suggested and then I had put it in almost 50 different versions of the document for various uses. I now have 50 versions to change instead of one.

It may be the way of publications people but she says that proofing is an iterative process and not all errors (and these are significant rewordings) are spotted in the first pass.

I usually try and stay on good terms with everyone, especially those who can make my life difficult if they try and hide any errors they make from the boss, but feel an urge to point out to her boss how much work she has created for me by either not explaining that she hadn't checked all the content or by missing things that she knew needed changing.

Rant over, back to 'find and replace'.

[Olf]

This is called having two bites at the cherry and in polite circles the cherry eater picks up the bill. So yes - tell your boss this retard is costing him money because they don't do their job right first time.

[s3fella]

Or tell her you will grass her up unless you can see her boobies!! LOL

[Neil_H]

Do it indirectly if you have to eg. send a mail with the managers copied in saying "is this really necessary, as it will add X amount of time to the project, and this was already signed-off X weeks ago" etc etc.

Pointing the finger directly can reflect badly on you.

[krap]

Neil_H said:

Do it indirectly if you have to eg. send a mail with the managers copied in saying "is this really necessary, as it will add X amount of time to the project, and this was already signed-off X weeks ago" etc etc.

Pointing the finger directly can reflect badly on you.

Exactly what i'd do! Also stops you having to explain it to the boss so you dont sound like a grass

[Brown and Boris]

Just had an email from her boss saying that she will have to make the changes! I think she knew this and was keeping her head down hoping I would do it (and she was right because I am half way through them).

Generally I am loathe to grass people up because we are all trying to make a living and I would hope that if I made a genuine cock up they would bail me out without going all 'formal'. I would do it for integrity issues or to explain why we are doing stuff late but generally I keep quiet if I can.


But it must be the nature of someone who spends their life in the detail of technical text that she got het up about whether the inverted commar goes before or after the full stop), as in; we will create a country and call it 'Pistonheads'. (or ......Pistonheads.' ). I don't care, she thinks it is a matter of national security.

She even got me on Wiki and it turns out she is is using the US convention (inside) and I am using the UK convention (outside) (and BBC News uses both styles), while scientific and technical publications, even in the U.S., almost universally use logical quotation (punctuation outside unless part of the source material), due to its precision.