Ugh. Work annoying. After one tech editor (that is, me and people doing jobs similar to mine, just assigned to different projects) is finished with a document that's at all consequential, the policy is to give it to another for a peer review. Seems simple, right? I did that with a recent project, and it hasn't turned out well. Not disastrous - I've certainly had worse - but low-key annoyance and embarrassment.

I didn't spend too much time on it. It's a relatively small and noncontroversial project, and it's an annual thing so most of the language was copied verbatim from previous projects. The designated peer reviewer happened to be a pretty laid-back guy, and he didn't find much in it that needed changing, so I was relieved. But then I was told that he had also passed it on to our supervisors, who found a lot more.

In addition to minor, trivial oversights that should be avoided of course but I can't really feel too bad about, I made two mistakes. First, I didn't compare it to a template of that exact type of document. I did compare it to a similar document to check basic formatting issues and I did catch some basic stuff that way, but there were several more things that I would have found if I had bothered to get out the right template. Oh well.

And I don't remember exactly what the second mistake was (I've been procrastinating on finishing this, of course), but if I had to guess, it had to do with one section I did correct mistakes in but shouldn't have, because a different person has final say over it than over the rest of the document. So now I've got an e-mail out there where I'm saying "no, sorry, it looks like you're still wrong about this" for the second time. Let's hope that's all the second problem was, because if there was more to it than that then tomorrow will not be fun.