and happy to be home. Except, of course, the airplane cough and cold have come home with me. So now I'm making meals out of prescription cough syrup that expired a year ago. Why didn't I buy some of this stuff while I was in India? I often buy meds overseas, and this trip I picked up some Amoxcillin and Ambien. But I didn't think of buying cough syrup -- darn! Now if only there was something for jet lag. This is the second night that I've gotten up at 2 AM. It will take about a week for my body clock to return to normal. That's the trouble with short trips. You get somewhere, and by the time you have adjusted to the new time zone, it's time to leave and the whole process starts all over again.
Before I left Delhi at the ridiculous hour of 3 AM Sunday morning, I formatted the second draft of the technical proposal and e-mailed it out to people for review. The formatting didn't work out very well. I ended up with five levels of text, which -- to my mind -- is two levels too many. But that will be fixed in time (I hope), although my feeling is that we will end up with four levels.
My client called yesterday afternoon. Apparently, while I was gone, they decided that I should also prepare the Management and Staffing section of the proposal. I am not sure how this came to be, since I was originally told that this was someone else's responsibility, and my scope-of-work makes no mention of it. But that's OK. I will get it done.
Then, when I turned on the computer this morning, there was an edited version of the technical section in my e-mail. Someone on my client's staff had already edited the draft I had sent out for substantive -- not editorial -- review. It is far too early to start editing. It will likely end up to be wasted effort, because the versions that I expect to receive from the technical reviewers will probably be considerably different in terms of substance and much of the wording will have changed anyway.
Everyone wants to be an editor. Inherently, this does not sound like a bad idea, but it is. It's a bad idea because we all have different writing styles and different ideas of how things should be done. Active or passive voice? Serial commas or not? Two spaces after a period or one? Etc., etc. You wouldn't think that things like the number of spaces after a period would be something that people would want to take the time to discuss, but questions like these can actually evolve into major arguments and time-wasters. I once worked with someone who was fixated on spacing. She would take a whole proposal and go through it to find places where there were extra spaces between words, and would mark them with a red pen. We don't really have time for this type of nonsense in a proposal -- our goals should be clarity, readability and consistency.
Aarggh, don't get me started on the subject of editing...
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