[Hitch]

There are days...

So, some months back, this fellow starts emailing me, about his books of poetry, or to be more accurate, his to-be, prospective books of poetry. He tells me that he has hundreds of poems that he's written, over the years, and he wants to make two books of poems, each 50 poems. I'm like, okay, great.

He emails me, over time, from time to time, saying he's making progress or this or that.

Two days ago, he starts emailing me about "how" he can send me his poems and how he's having trouble figuring out how to sort them. Now, me being a blithering idiot, I think he means that as he's sorted them (he says) by date, that he can't figure out how to sort them, that way, inside Word. I figure, okay, he's not a sophisticated Word user, so I show him how to use Styles and headings and Outline View, and how he can easily drag-drop a date heading and the corresponding poem, with it so that in the Navigation Pane, he can readily sort them via Date, right?

Then he acts like I'm speaking Martian. So..okay, back-and-forth ensues, while I try to figure out WTF the problem is.

Finally, (after, I kid thee not, 4-5 more email exchanges) I realize that this bozo is actually talking about--wait for it--sending me 100 different files. 100 different poems, in different files, which apparently, he expects us to sort and concatenate, us to convert from Pages to Word (you can't typeset Pages in InDesign; you need docx files) and all that--and a good 10 hours of that work would have to be done, before we could even quote him (we quote fixed prices, based on word count, difficulty factor, etc., not hourly rates). Ten HOURS of clerical work, secretarial work, before we could even quote him. (About 4 hours of one of us converting Pages-->Word; another 3+ hours of me concatenating the files, in order to get final word count and an idea of what's what; probably 2 hours to figure out what to quote this mess and 1 hour just because.)

And when I explain that all this time, I thought he meant that he was making a manuscript, like the 9,000 other manuscripts we've seen, and quoted, over the years--he acts like I'm imposing upon him! That I am being unreasonable, to expect him to do this, as he's (I'm quoting) just spend DAYS getting it all ready, checking line breaks (? What? Why does he think that assembling his files in sequence, in a Word or Pages file, would affect LINE-breaks, I ask you?), and all that. I'm a soulless ghoul, apparently.

Honestly, I'm gobsmacked. I mean, who is this clueless and inconsiderate, to feel that book designers and formatters should do all this unpaid secretarial and clerical work, because what? You're too lazy to learn how to use your tool, Pages or Word? or can't be bothered, because--gasp--you're a POET?

Unbelievable. He feels it's far too much work for him to do--but apparently, a matter of a trice for us to do, amirite?

Wowzers. Just Wowzers.

Hitch