year 4 is off to a bad start...

all sorts of atrocious scheduling problems at work have ensured that you will not receive a lengthy, quality sermon (regardless of whether you felt the last dozen or so were "quality"). yes, when i should be propped at my computer preparing my comeback sermon, the ultimate kickoff for year 4, i am stuck working overtime on projects i should've been able to work on weeks ago. in fact, instead of having time to write a sermon, i only have time to write the excuse, which is in summary: the closer you are to the ass, the harder you get fucked.

it goes like this:

a book begins as little more than an idea. when it comes to computer/reference publishing, that idea seldom comes from the author. it comes from a publisher, or a developer (if you even know what a "developer" does, you work in a marketing-oriented industry). then that idea is shared with other developers & the salesforce. is this idea worthwhile?

this is when things start getting tricky. the go-ahead is given. the book will become reality. sometimes this happens because the idea is a strong one... hey, that could be a great book! but usually quality has nothing to do with it. it fits in our marketing strategy! we have to put out 200 books this year; this might as well be one of them.

immediately the team goes to work. promises are made to retailers: we're going to have this great book that you absolutely must put on display! it's the bee's knees, the cat's pajamas, and a bag of chips! and you will have it in your grubby little mitts on this exact day.

if you've been paying attention, you will have noticed that this book has been promised to retailers on a specific date... but it doesn't have an author yet. who cares?! authors are an afterthought. they get assigned later down the line.

well, skip ahead a bit. the author(s) have been assigned. they have made their own commitments: yes, i will have written this whole book by the such&such of whatevermonth! it will be poetic, insightful, informative, on-topic! but inevitably the author gets his head stuck in a garage door & doesn't even start writing until his final deadline is approaching. the bookstores are still expecting the book on the promised date.

finally chapters start coming in... but whoa! does this guy even know what he's talking about? the chapters are barely legible, full of inaccuracies, have ugly illustrations... & just sometimes they've been plagiarized (straight out of the windows help files, even). now they must be cleaned up. the technical errors must be fixed. sometimes the author must be fired, or at least supplementary authors must be hired to help out & write about subjects that the primary author finally admitted he's totally ignorant about. the chapters are now quite late, yet still the stores expect the book on time.

then the book must be copyedited (a totally separate process from working out the technical errrors). but things are in such a rush that the copyeditor can't (or is too incompetent to) catch all the major mistakes. everything is now very late. that is when the book gets to me. i must fix everything i can, & the stores still expect the book on time. i'm at the tail end of the process (& any parliament fan knows that a tail is just a long booty).

basically, the people "above me" make promises to the stores about when the book will be done. they also make promises to us about when they will get us material & what they will do to it beforehand. they do not meet their promises to us. yet still we are expected to meet their promises to the stores. or i should say that i am expected to meet their promises, because i have to pick up all the slack. multiply all this by 5 or 10 & that has been my july.

but, as i've heard said more than once, "nobody is to blame for that." so i guess "nobody is to blame" for this sermon being so lame, either.

the killing stroke here is that more energy is put into the marketing of a product than the product itself. the final book can almost never be as good as the idea; it can't even be as good as i'd like it to be because i'm too busy (or powerless) to clean it up to my satisfaction.

i'd like to think it's just this company, or just the frenzied nature of publishing, but i don't think it is at all. sure, these examples are exaggerated, but i have a feeling you could replace "book" with any other product these days & the gyst of this excuse/sermon would still ring true.

that's it for this week's excuse. i wish i had time to "inject some more humor" as one reader put it, but i think i've shown that i don't have time right now to take pride in my work...