May 2022. This is a post from the beginning of the pandemic. It’s been sitting in my draft folder for more than two years now. I am publishing it without revising, so please excuse its first-draft form.
I QA’d two reports today. Both grammar and number. What that means is that there were two reports (both in Word, one 25 pages, one 19 pages) and I read them over checking that all the numbers used were correct, then read them again to see if all the grammar was correct.
This is a part of my job I’ve liked. Indeed, it is the part of the job I’m focusing on growing into a business during this time of unemployment. It’s the part of the job that inspired me to get a certificate in copyediting.
Still, two Word reports in one day is usually a situation I would try to avoid. But today is the last full day, so I did them both as best I can.
The reason I had to do two reports in one day is that one of my colleagues informed us all last Monday that she wouldn’t be able to write the report that was scheduled to be done on the upcoming Friday. So another colleague got to do the heavy lift of writing a report from scratch (because the assigned report writer had not started, despite theoretically working on it the previous week) and the deadline got moved to the very last full day, when there already was a report due.
I was only slightly irritated with this situation until another coworker complained that he thought it was unfair that the initial report writer wasn’t going to be paid for the last week of work and wasn’t going to get the severance package and didn’t we all agree?
I wrote back that I did not and my irritation moved from slight to complete.
On the one hand, none of this matters because people are dying and as of tomorrow none of these people will be my coworkers, but on the other hand, the gall of the person who dropped the ball completely, made more than a few people’s work life difficult and then got mad that they weren’t paid?
Also today, I had to call the tech people and tell them to cancel all the emails except for four of my colleagues who apparently are continuing with the company in some capacity. I’m a bit annoyed no one has asked me to continue working, as work allows, but also not surprised. The people in charge like to be flattered and I’m not a flatterer.
So here I am, a prickly nearly unemployed employee of a company I’ve been with four four years. I’m looking forward to dragging my work station in, turning in my computer, and starting the next phase of my life.