Someone to do the "donkey work"

["Downing, David" <david -dot- downing -at- Fiserv -dot- com>]

I'm currently in the midst of doing a task that has to be done as part of the process of preparing a manual to submit to our editor -- and which seems like it's something the writers shouldn't be stuck doing. (Actually, the department manager and the editor used to do it, but then they decided each writer should do it for their own manuals.) The task is to locate every manual reference and add the proper hyperlink by then locating the PDF name of the referenced manual and pasting that in as the hyperlink. It can take a long time and it seems like the kind of "donkey work" that ought to be relegated to a data entry person. Of course, we don't have the budget to bring in a data entry person.

Anyway, I was wondering how other folks here handled this sort of situation. If you're an employee, so you have someone in your department to do the donkey work? If you're a contractor, do you farm out the donkey work to someone?

David Downing
Senior Technical Writer
Credit Union Solutions
Fiserv
 
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