RE: Dirty trick or fair play (was: RE: Honestly -- when an SME completely REWRITES your text ... GEEZ!)

["McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>]

Downing, David [mailto:DavidDowning -at- users -dot- com] revealed:
[...] 
> However, that editor did something that I thought was kind of a dirty
> trick, and I was wondering whether the folks on this list agree or
feel
> it was fair play. She called a meeting with me to discuss the matter
and
> I explained it to her, just like I explained it to you. And I believe
I
> made it clear that I understood now that working with another person
was
> a whole different ball game than working alone, and that now that I
> understood that, I would never submit anything to her that I hadn't
> spell-checked.
> 
> So I thought we had resolved it between ourselves -- BUT ...
> 
> Along came my six-month review, and in those days, we had peer
reviews,
> rather than manager reviews. She was one of my reviewers, and had made
a
> statement something on the order of, "I was shocked by the fact that
> David turned in a draft that was full of spelling and typographical
> errors." She made no reference to the discussion we'd had in which I
> explained why I did that -- thus making it sound like an act of pure
> carelessness, or a complete lack of awareness that the document needed
> to be proofed at some point.
> 
> I realize that you can argue that this was a professional relationship
> and not a friendship, and that therefore, it wasn't reasonable for me
to
> expect her to just let the matter drop when I explained myself to her
--
> that an official screw-up can be expected to result in an official
> reprimand. But I feel like she could have at least included my
> explanation in her comment.

That WAS a dirty trick, assuming that any significant time had passed
since the original egregious event, and you'd demonstrated that you had
fixed the problem in any intervening submissions.

But then, you could look on the bright side:
For the following review, you could look back to the first one as your
"points to improve" and say, truthfully, that you had improved
enormously since the previous cycle... without having had to do a thing
that you hadn't been doing since the day after the original incident. 

In other words, even as "bad" as you were at that original review, you
were still valuable enough to retain. So now (at the one year or
whatever review), you are that valuable _plus_ a vast improvement.  Wow!
Give that man a bigger raise!   :-)

By the way, most review processes require sign-off by the reviewee;
that's your opportunity to insert your own comments and corrections.
Didn't you take that opportunity?

 - Kevin
 

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