Washed up on the beach

Another day, more trivia to deal with, less accomplished.

I'm working on a team project. A complicated bid solicitation has to be put together to be posted online.

It's amazing how some members of the team don't stop and think things through. One team member was asked to provide charts and diagrams. He delivered them by dropping printed versions into my office mailbox. How does he suppose I'm going to include this in the online document? Please copy the files into the right directory, sir!

Another person was charged with putting together a list of recipients for a mass mailing. She put together the list of names. I suppose it would be too much to expect her to put together a mailing list, but for heaven's sake, you'd think she could have at least included the mailing and email addresses!

The work slows down considerably when the person charged with writing parts of the document claims not to know how to use Microsoft Word. So she writes in longhand on yellow paper and expects someone else to enter her words. It gets pretty inefficient when this person copies pages of text in longhand that she pulls from a printed Word document, and then can't refer the poor typist to the original document to copy and paste.

Finally, we were charged with making the draft document as perfect as possible before presenting it to the boss for review. We were even admonished to make sure that all the embedded hyperlinks were correct. Then, we were asked to print off a hard copy to send to the boss for review. Umm, about those hyperlinks?

Clearly, I need to step back and look at the big picture.

And, oh, how big it is!

What bits of flotsam have washed up on your sandy shores this week?