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I have an exasperating situation here and am looking for some thoughts.
The situation: I've been ghostwriting a document for an engineer. It's taken
a very, very long time because he's not interested in writing the thing, but
management is insisting that it be done. Ok. I've pretty much finished it by
dint of many long interviews, extracting each bit of information at a time.
Anyway. I got it almost all the way through the signature process and Bam!
umpteen changes by the boss, who had supposedly reviewed it twice before.
Fine. We talk it over (and over and over and over) I put the resulting
changes in, hand him the new version to review. Call him 2 weeks later,
after a short vacation, so see how he's doing? He claims to have no memory
of this. (By the way -- I'm a permanent employee here, so they keep paying
me, plus I do have other jobs to work on in the meantime.)
What I've been doing: Throughout this project I've kept a notebook in which
I record when interviews take place, when I give him (and others) review
copies, when I check up on them and the results, and so on. My intent here
is to establish a record that I am doing my part of the task promptly and
responsibly. But I WANT TO FINISH THIS THING! Any suggestions, both on ways
to finish this and on other ways to avoid making a bad name for myself?
-- Meg, who'd really, really like to finish this ***** thing.
