Diary of a report writer and his big break into bad business

You wouldn't like me when I'm angry

Photo © 2024 Limor Zellermayer | https://unsplash.com/fr/@limorganon

Friday

Utter bastard.

For the second time this week I have had to work overnight for this arsehole to get his job done. As directed, I have taken great care to replace the concise and correct use of English in my original report with an idiomatic minestrone of convoluted expressions. The difference is dramatic. My original was a business-casual kind of document. It’s now three pages longer and reads like the transcript of a teenager on TikTok whining inarticulately between tokes on his inhaler.

I send it off at dawn. At lunchtime, tit-face comes back by email to demand that I rewrite it again before the end of the day (because I’ve "done it wrong") otherwise they won’t pay. By now I’m royally fed up with this wanker’s pissy antics at his shit-for-brains company full of turds.

I type the aforementioned sentence into my email reply.

But before I click SEND I have a change of heart. I delete the insult and replace it with a friendly acknowledgement that I no longer expect be paid for the work. Indeed (continuing with a flourish) I formally request that since the company will not be paying for the report, it is, by definition, not theirs to use. The company must not share or publish it – internally or externally, at all, in the slightest, under any circumstances whatsoever – and that my Word files should be destroyed immediately.

After hitting the SEND button, I silence my phone and sprawl across the sofa, comtemplating whether to spend the rest of the afternoon binge-rewatching Mr Robot from season 1.

I check my phone at 5:00 PM. I have received seven messages from a completely different person at the tosser’s company. She requests politely, if increasingly pleadingly from one email to the next, whether I would mind doing one last rewrite and send it in.

I fish out my original report from earlier this week, change the version number at the end of the filename – remembering to open and immediately resave it unchanged, of course, purely to update the metadata – and email it across to her. Within minutes, a reply comes back:

"Thanks. Great work. Send in your invoice."

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Thursday

He’s an idiot.

He might be the boss of me for the moment but I’m curious to know why a world-renowned organisation would have chosen such a deadhead to commission and edit reports. After radio silence throughout yesterday afternoon all the way up to 10:00 AM today, he now emails me to rant about how late things are running.

He says my work does not conform to their standards with respect to use of terminology. I ask for examples of what I have written incorrectly. Much later, in the afternoon, I receive a copy of my Word file – saved as a ‘.docx’ – into which someone has inserted a few comments typed in red. No, not Track Changes, just red text typed directly into my report, thereby messing up the layout.

One of the red comments complains that the layout is messed up.