Don't do what I did: An object lesson

I've been of two minds about posting this little anecdote for several weeks. Frankly, it's extremely embarrassing to me. But maybe, just maybe my example will be a gentle reminder that helps someone, somewhere avoid making the same costly mistake.

I worked on an exciting new project recently. The client was someone I had known for several years, and her enthusiasm was catching. I had no doubt her product would be informative and marketable, and I was eager to be a part of it. When it arrived in my inbox, I delved in happily and spent a portion of each of six days working on the project.
At the end of the project, though, the come-down was abrupt and painful. The client sent me a series of messages about mistakes she noticed that I did not correct in the proofing process. Not just one or two little errors, either, but dozens.

Worse yet, some of these mistakes were pointed out to the client by customers who had bought the product.
There can hardly be a worse blow to a proofreader's reputation--not to mention the client's--than that.

At first I was in total disbelief, maybe even outright denial. I mean, I have such a hard time turning off the proofreader in my head that I can be hard to live with sometimes. Sure, I had been working later hours than normal during that project, but fatigue alone could not explain this huge number of uncorrected problems. I asked for details about the errors, then read and reread the client's responses, searching for anything that might make this make sense. Were they cases where there's no clear right and wrong word choice? Differences in stylebook preference? Unconventional usages? Debatable grammar? Specialized vocabulary?

In fact, they were not. When I quit examining my emails and pulled myself together enough to look again at the final document I'd sent her, I was stunned. These were rather obvious mistakes. How could I possibly have missed them?

I do not exaggerate when I say, I began to doubt my sanity. For several days, my thoughts were consumed with not just the embarrassment of the situation, but the question of what was wrong with me. It wasn't just that my pride was hurt; in particular, my mind kept coming back to one very specific error, one which was just far too familiar to ignore. I knew with not a grain of uncertainty that I had seen and corrected that mistake. And yet there it was, glaring at me in the final document. Was I actually becoming delusional?

I realized I would not be able to rest easily until I did something. It was too late to save this project and my reputation with this client. But for my own peace of mind, I had to know what went wrong. There was only one way I could think of to do that: I retrieved the original file the client had sent me, and I started proofing again from scratch. At the very least, I figured I would gain an (apparently much-needed) extensive brush-up session. And I admit, I hoped to find a bit of absolution from the guilt of messing up so badly by putting in some extra hours of sweat.

I'm still not done with the re-proofing since I can only looking at it when I'm not buried in something more immediate. But it has been worthwhile just the same because while saving one night, I scanned the list of file names, and the "what happened" light bulb finally came on.

My first reaction was relief that I was not losing my grasp of reality. There it was in black and white: I really had made those corrections, even the specific one that had been nagging me. I was not losing it. But my relief was tempered quickly with round upon round of mental repetitions of "what a stupid, stupid mistake." And I had made it right at the beginning of the project.

Most of my regular clients use .doc files, but I have Word 2007. So every time I start a job, I have to use "Save as..." to change from the default .docx to .doc when I rename an edited file. I've been doing this since I installed Word 2007; switching files to .doc is a deeply ingrained habit. This client's original file, however, was a .docx. After the first session of proofing, I saved as I always do, making it a .doc without even thinking. Then the next day, I realized that wasn't right for this job. But I also knew full well that simply changing the file type back to .docx would likely result in formatting changes, odd characters, etc. (been there before!), so I turned off my time-tracker and resigned myself to manually re-entering all the changes into a fresh copy of the file, in the right format.

Tedious? Yes. So much so, apparently, that my mind shut off to the task. And I did it badly. And I forfeited an invoice. And I screwed up a project I believed in, all while annoying a client.


Since this episode, I've wondered how else I could have fixed that initial mistake. I've been reading more about Word's ability to merge documents, but what I've found thus far is not encouraging. I had not attempted to merge the .doc and .docx files (instead of manually re-entering changes) because I've had only spotty luck with this feature in the past. Even between matching file types, it's a notoriously inconsistent operation. I still would have had to compare the document line by line to be assured they were the same--which means, I probably still would have made this drastic set of errors.

If I had only paid attention to the file type to begin with, I would have saved myself--and my client--a world of trouble.

Readers, I will NOT ask you to use today's Comments to confess your worst, most professionally damaging mistakes. I'm not going to ask a question at all. Just please, please take a lesson from what I did wrong, and check, double-check, triple-check what you're doing every time you save your work. THAT kind of proofing is priceless.