Don't be such an idiot!

Oh, my supervising editor is annoying me so much right now.
I'm meant to be finishing off a book by the middle of next week and she just dumped revisions of another one, which she's ignored for a week, back on my desk with a deadline of tomorrow.

That's not what's really ticking me off though. The annoying thing is that this revision-loaded MS comes to me from someone who's so awful at her job. She wants me to change "letter-opener" to "paper knife" to conform with British English but misses the word "mail" rather than "post" in the same sentence. And both are valid BrE anyway. Oh, and letter-opener doesn't have a hyphen, she says - "always check the spelling of tricky words". Tricky words? Fuck off and die. You just tried to make kids describe a character's "Personalities" rather than "Personality" because the header had three boxes under it for them to fill in. You fuckwit.

Same page, two lines down, she reveals her Passive Nazi failings. She crosses things through with an "Avoid passive" so often she should get a stamp for it instead of writing it out by hand, yet suggests an active verb be replaced with "is used" in a question. Are we avoiding the passive or not? Sorry, I mean is the passive being avoided by us? You don't even know, do you? It's just on some poxy little style list your English 101 tutor gave you at the beginning of university, which you subsequently laminated.


*deep breath*

It's sad really. She just does everything by rote. She can't cope with anything unusual or new, and seemingly has little understanding of how the books we produce will actually be used. I think the problem is the corporate model where promotion means doing something other than the job you've got settled into and are good at. So, for example, perfectly competent editors (which she probably is, in all fairness) get put into a role where they have to supervise content (which she is tragically inept at).