If I could control my attention to detail, I'd be indispensable in any job.

Yesterday, I got back another writer's review of something I had previously edited. There were a lot of editing marks on it. As for most of it, I could pretty easily think that it's all fair enough, this was never supposed to be the final version, I made mistakes just like everyone else does, et cetera. In two instances, though, the mistakes were so blatant, such basic violations of proper style, that I was embarrassed. I've been in this job for more than two years, I've been writing since college, I really should catch it when an ampersand is used instead of the word "and" in a formal document, and pay attention to whether an abbreviation has periods between letters or not. (If some are correct and others aren't, of course, and they're all side by side within a couple pages, and so on.) I'm not worried about job security because of this one document, of course, but I've been keeping my nose clean a bit more than usual since yesterday morning.

And then, 10 minutes ago as I was leaving a meeting, I was in the elevator with the manager of a project I'm on and three other people. One of the other passengers was carrying a book with "X Publishing" written on the cover in a weird font, and she was holding the book so that the text was more upside down than not. "X" was my project manager's last name. I noticed this and pointed it to him during a four-floor elevator trip. I'm pretty sure that's unusual, but it happens to me all the time. Too bad I didn't have that attention to detail about ampersands and punctuating abbreviations on the document last week...