From: utterpedant

This just happened last week. It's complicated and lacks the universal appeal many of these stories have, but I'm furious about it and need to vent.

The publication where I work just put out an advertising-heavy special edition.

Since we had to do our normal publication on top of this and since the boss keeps trying to cut hours and avoid overtime, he chose to hire an outside production freelancer to lay out the special section.

We sent the freelancer placeholder copy (lorem ipsum) and ads so he could mock up the layout. As approved ads and final copy came in, we'd send him the finished replacements to flow into the designated spaces.

The freelancer worked at home, but our boss kept in contact with him and assured us everything was going fine in the special section.

So print day rolls around, and suddenly nobody can contact the freelancer. He's not responding to e-mails or answering his phone. The boss says everything's fine, that he's seen the section and it's perfect.

Now it's two hours past our print deadline and my boss comes in, tosses us a DVD with a wink, and says "See? I told you everything would work out just fine." The freelancer had dropped by and delivered our section, picked up his check, and left.

Well, we'll be a little late to the printer, but at least we have our section. We'll do some rapid corrections in InDesign and send it out ASAP. Let's see what's on the DVD....

Flattened, uneditable PDFs – essentially pictures of each page of the special section.

And each page is a disaster.

The boss had sent the freelancer uncorrected copy to use as placeholder text, and that's what was in the PDFs, complete with typos and notes to the editor (like "Daniel Defresne !!CHECK SPELLING!!"). One article was still completely in lorem ipsum.

Large sections of each page were left blank. The paper was full of outdated and expired placeholder ads.

Full-page color ads for serious fucking advertisers (like, you know, Microsoft) consisted of a blank white page with "ad: microsoft" written in the middle.

We turn to the boss in amazement. This is a disaster. We can't run this. We'll need to somehow create an entire new special section in the next 30 minutes, or else we'll –

That's when my boss says he told the freelancer to send the files directly to the printer.

It's now 4 a.m., it's too late to stop printing, and pulling the special section means we'd have to pull the normal publication, as well.

So the special edition hit the streets in shamefully amateur disaster nightmare form, and we had to void $15,000 worth of advertising contracts.

And that's why I've already gone through three bottles of Jameson this week.

--utterpedant