Does everybody remember that episode of M*A*S*H where the Army mistakenly declares Hawkeye dead, and he’s so fed up with everything that he decides to just go with it? In the episode’s climax, he delivers a little speech to BJ about how he just doesn’t care anymore. He says something to the effect of, “It doesn’t matter if I’m here or not. The wounded will just keep coming. Trapper went home and they keep coming. Henry got killed, and they keep coming.”

I know just how he feels. Yes, this is another complaint about work. Click away if you’ve gotten bored with those. I need to get this stuff off my chest, though, even if nobody is interested in reading it.

There’s this big project, you see, that my team and I have been wrestling with for over five months now. (By contrast, most of what we do usually comes and goes in a couple of weeks, at most.) It was the single biggest component of the July Apocalypse, an unusual surge of work that was made all the worse by having this monster lurking in the background the whole bloody time. (There was also another really big project competing for bandwidth during that same period, but it, thankfully, is now finished and out the door.)

I won’t bore you with the details, and I’m not sure how much I can say publicly anyhow, but I don’t think I’m breaking any confidences to explain that this project — which is an annually recurring thing I’ve experienced twice before — consists of multiple related documents that all share the same boilerplate copy, as well as some text that is unique to each individual piece. Now, you’d think that would be fairly easy to handle, even with so many docs, right? That it’d be just a matter of getting the boilerplate right, then plugging in the unique bits, giving everything a final review, and sending it all on its way. But no. These bloody monsters from the bowels of hell are never that cut-and-dried.

The biggest problem, in my humble opinion, is that there is no drop-dead date after which the copy can no longer be changed. For this project, we can — and we usually do — continue tinkering with the text even after the documents have been sent to the publisher, right up to the moment the presses (or whatever they use these days — some kind of giant inkjet, probably) start rolling. Add to that the fact that these documents are a kind of centerpiece from which a lot of other projects spin off, so there’s a great deal of pressure to get the messaging “perfect” (even though we’ll get another crack at perfecting these things in only a few short months when we “refresh” the whole damn bunch of them yet again). Also, there are many, many stakeholders that all want to put their personal stamp on this big prestigious thing, and they don’t all return their feedback to us at the same time. And then there’s the problem of internal logistics, i.e., the way my team ends up processing these things in batches, so what usually happens is that one batch meets all of our criteria for perfection at the time it’s reviewed, and we all sign our John Hancocks and think that’s that, one batch down. But then on the next batch, somebody will tweak some of that wonderful boilerplate that’s supposed to be the same across the entire project. So now that first batch has to be updated and re-approved. And around and around we go, leading to this crushing feeling that this bloody project will never, ever be finished.

I’ve given my approval as proofreader to every individual component of this project so many times I can no longer remember, but they just keep finding their way back to my desk. It’s immensely frustrating. I’ve rhetorically asked the question “How many times do I need to sign off on these things?” a dozen times in the last few days. And because these damn zombie documents just won’t stay dead, no matter how many times you bludgeon them, I and everyone else on the team are becoming snowblind — we don’t see the errors anymore because we’ve read this copy, or some variant of it, so many times that our brains automatically skim across it without stopping. Which introduces a very big chance of major errors creeping in and not getting caught before the docs are “on press,” or — much, much worse — printed and on the shelves somewhere. And that in turn ratchets up the pressure right at the end of the project, when you’d normally expect everyone to be winding down.

And underlying all of this, lurking somewhere in the back of everyone’s mind, is the knowledge that we get to do this all over again only a few months from now, right after we come back from our holiday break.

Eventually, though, a final, inescapable due date does come — by which point everyone involved is so sick and tired of these things that we all want to scream. And actually the last time that due date came around, back in October, I did end up doing some screaming. But that’s another story. For now, let’s just say that the final due date for these refreshes is always incredibly chaotic and a very, very long day.

Today is the final due date for this latest round of Whack-a-Mole on these accursed things. But unlike Hawkeye, whose sense of duty overrode his sense of futility and got him to walk back into the OR, I’m not at work. My employer generously offers four bonus days off during the summer, with the single proviso that they must be taken between Memorial Day and Labor Day, or you lose them. Because of the Apocalypse and this massive Project-that-Must-Not-Be-Named, I’ve already skipped or rescheduled several of my “summer Fridays,” and the opportunity to use them is running out. So when this one rolled around, I decided — with my supervisor’s approval, of course — that enough was enough, I was tired and I wasn’t going to be screwed out of my scheduled bonus day this time. So here I am at home this afternoon while my team handles all the last-minute madness without me and prepares, no doubt, to be at the office until the wee hours tonight.

And you know what? I don’t feel guilty at all. Not one bit. Because, as Hawkeye said, they’ll just keep coming whether I’m there or not.

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