The Light of Day

[Dianne Blake <write-it -at- home -dot- com>]

John Posada wrote in the thread "don't think everyone doesn't make
mistakes?":
> 
> 2) Make sure you don't put anything in your documentation that
> you wouldn't want to see the light of day. We've all heard the
> horror stories of those who put really nasty comments in hidden
> text or previous versions, then was surprised when customer
> turned on hidden text or displayed revision tracking. What if
> the comment had been something less politicaly correct than what
> it was.

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I recently worked at a place where one of the instructors constantly
added notes to himself in his PowerPoint presentations. That isn't too
bad, but he wouldn't go back and look at his work before sending it off
to the printers, or delivering the materials to other instructors to
teach.

I can't tell you how many times I would review his work (before teaching
it, but after he sent it to the printer) and find phrases like:

   *  Yadda, yadda, yadda
   *  Ask so-and-so about this
   *  ????
   *  What does this mean?

OR he would start creating a diagram, get it half done, and then just
leave a bunch of boxes and lines (not connected of course) all scattered
about on the page.  Who knows what he was planning to communicate.

What is worse, he tended to get the materials "completed" the day before
they were to be shipped to the printer.  He would then realize he needed
to make a couple of changes and would do so.  This meant that there were
times that the materials and the actual Presentations did not match (so
students would groan about "I don't have this page").  

I would end up fixing the pages (if I knew the answers) and then hand
copying them myself (for up to 16 students at a time) so that the
company and I would not be embarrassed by these items.  I couldn't stand
the thought of traveling to client sites in New York or Amsterdam with
botched materials of this magnatude.  Sometimes I would have to rework
whole lessons because he had put in notes to himself about what to
change in the next release, but never got back to the lesson.

Yes, we did have change control in our office, he just tended to do
things his own way and would overwrite the master copies, so there was
no way to go back to the previous version.  As far as I know, he still
works there - I'm just glad I don't.