Keeping Calm

It’s been quite a week….

For two days I told the project manager that I’d accept changes until Wednesday morning, and then I’d send the final drafts for approval that afternoon. He assured me that was fine.

I sent the final drafts at 4:56 pm. At 5:06, exactly 10 minutes later, came email from a random reviewer. One look at the subject line — “update to documentation” — and I didn’t even bother to read the email. #facepalm.

I’m publishing a series of large PDFs, using a DITA Open Toolkit transform with a custom plug-in and running it through a third-party publishing engine. There are a lot of moving parts, and predictably I’m having trouble with little things like page numbers and missing images. Making steady progress, fixing them one by one.

Once in a while, seemingly on a whim, the transform decides it can’t find the path to the publishing engine and crashes. #facepalm again.

Through it all, I’m learning to keep calm. I’ve found that this little sign helps me get through.

I hope you like it. Feel free to pass it on.