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Originally Posted by Hitch
AND, yet more fun from the World Headquarters; got a book in today, in Word, and most of it is text topiary. GOSH, do you think that maybe, the author has never even SEEN a Kindle/Nook/iBooks/Kobo/you-name-it?
I'm trying to figure out how the hell to explain what's going to happen when the font size is increased. {SIGH}.
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I think of many of them as "write only", and believe they don't, in fact,
read.
(I'm likely biased, because my preferred genre of SF/F has lots and lots of noobie self-published types blissfully unaware that their spiffy new never before done idea has been done at least a dozen times, beginning before they were born, and done better than they can ever hope to. What's that? Actually
read the genre you want to write in to get an idea of what's already been done to death? Nah. That's
boring...
)
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Why me? I musta been a real horror, in my past life, to deserve this never-ending parade.
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You didn't duck fast enough?
An old friend named Val used to describe himself as "the guy standing up when the feces hit the fan."
In one notable instance, he was first one in the office, shedding his coat and sipping his coffee when the phone rang. It was a woman he knew. She had gone into her garage, opened both driver's and passenger side doors wide, climbed into her car, and then attempted to back the car out of the garage. The garage door wasn't wide enough to permit that. What she did was tear both doors off the car, and drop the front of the garage onto her car's roof. She had to crawl out through a rear passenger windows. She was on the street, staring at the totaled remains of her car and garage, and all she she could think to do was call Val and gasp her tale of woe.
As Val hung up the phone with a stupefied expression, his boss came out of his office and said "Oh, you heard about your units!" "No. What about my units?"
Val was an industrial designer, and lead designer on a new product. His company made big mutha rooftop air conditioners. They had a new model in prototype, and the plant in Tennessee had loaded a couple on a flat bed trailer for transport to the design offices in suburban PA so the Underwriter's Labs engineers could give them UL certification.
One of them came
off the trailer on an up ramp to the VA turnpike, and drop forged the Buick Regal driving behind it into a pancake. The driver of the Regal was in serious condition in the hospital, and as Val put it, "the lawyers have not yet been
born who will be getting rich on the litigation of this case!"
Meanwhile, Val faced the prospect of an invasion of lawyers and company loss prevention specialists who would want proof that Val's shop had issued precise, word of one syllable, profusely illustrated with pictures documents on exactly
how you secured a unit for shipment, because the trucking company would point at the loading dock personnel and vice versa in assigning blame for how it could happen.
I never did hear how that all came out. Val left the company (and the reasons why are another classic story) before the case came to trail.
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Dennis