A recap of my gig

My assignment is done! Finished! Over!

I did not enjoy it. Here's why:

The office was quiet. Too quiet. There were about 12 people total on staff and we all sat in our offices, huddled over our computers and papers, barely talking to each other about anything--even work. The young woman who was in the office next to me was very sweet and she came into my office one day and chatted for about 10 or 15 minutes. The uber-boss, a guy named Joe, walked by my door as we were talking and without looking at us, walked into his office and closed his door loudly. My coworker turned and looked at the door, then looked back at me with a nervous expression and said, "Uh.. I'd better go." What message did Joe send to her with his loud door? What happened in the past that a door slam without so much as a look in our direction could make her jump? I can only imagine.

I hardly ever interacted with Joe, but I could hear him on the phone yelling at a family member fairly often. I don't know if it was a wife or an ex-wife. I get the feeling that Joe has a few ex-wives out there. When he wasn't yelling at a family member, he had big fights with another coworker--a woman named Sally who has worked there for a long time. The way these two fight with each other leads me to believe that they were at one time romantically involved. They swear, they talk over each other, they bring up past problems and use them against each other. They were clearly in love once.

One time, Sally walked into Joe's office as he was getting off the phone with his wife/ex-wife. Here's their conversation:

Sally: What was that about?
Joe: I don't know. She wants to get Jamba Juice.
Sally: Well, great, fuck her. I'd love to get Jamba Juice, you know? Some people have to work. I'd love to go get Jamba Juice in the middle of the day.
Joe: I know. She wants Jamba Juice. What are you gonna do?
Sally: Well, whatever. I just want to show you these pages.

Is this a normal conversation between two coworkers in an office setting? I do not think so. And that was the atmosphere of the office. Deathly silence peppered with profanity-filled fights.

Me, I kept my head down and tried to do the work. But even that was annoying, thanks to one editor in the office who apparently was taught that the way to make a sentence the most grammatically correct is to make it the most awkward. He puts all adverbs toward the beginning of the sentence. He has a deep and abiding love of the phrase "that is" and he inserts it everywhere he possibly can. He believes that a whole range of words have one and only one meaning and you must always use that one word to convey that one meaning. He takes perfectly good articles written by perfectly good writers and he dutifully crushes every last bit of life out of them. He is the embodiment of why writers hate editors.

Take this sentence:

You can play on the swing and you can also play on the slide.

He would change it to:

You can play on the swing and you also can play on the slide.

Why would he change a natural-sounding sentence that is perfectly grammatically correct? WHY??? It probably learned that you shouldn't split an infinitive (which isn't correct but some people think it is) only he got it into his head that if you shouldn't split an infinitive then you shouldn't split any compound verbs even though it's perfectly fine to split compound verbs THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH IT AND IT SOUNDS A WHOLE LOT BETTER. But he is so concerned with following some arcane rules that aren't even rules that he forgot that he's editing for people.

If you'd like to read another rant about splitting compound verbs, check out this blog post written by a former president of the American Copy Editors Society:

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2009/06/damn-you-ap-stylebook.html

And in case you're still with me (because clearly I'm just ranting for myself at this point), let's look at another example. Let's take this sentence:

John Smith, vice president of Acme Group, tells his clients to read the fine print in a contract.

He would change it to:

John Smith, who is vice president of Acme Group, tells his clients that they should read the fine print that is in a contract.

When I read the first sentence, I feel like I am on top of it, like I've got the information I need and I am ready to find out what the next sentence will bring. When I read the second sentence, I feel autistic.

Okay, I'm done ranting. It wasn't all bad, but I am happy to be done. I'm back home just in time for spring break, though, so I won't have much time to myself for another week.

But I hope I'll have much more time to blog!