I have spent the morning fantasizing about flying to Colorado and punching a stranger in the face.
She is my client, or rather my department's client, and I'm editing copy for her. And then we send it out for client approval and she inserts changes and then it comes BACK to me to try to rip the suck back out without stepping on any toes.

She fancies herself a writer, which means she has inserted "fun" phrasings into the previously clean copy. Including puns. She put puns in there. And they're still arguably better than the many phrases she inserted that apparently sounded good to her but simply don't make sense. I'm still trying to figure out how to diplomatically log my explanation for stetting her change. "This changes the original meaning of this sentence" is as far as I've gotten.

And she likes to change individual sentences without reading the whole paragraph. Sometimes, when you change individual sentences one at a time without reading the whole paragraph, redundancies can be introduced. And that means things can get redundant. If you insert sentences without reading the whole paragraph, redundancies can be introduced. It's important to read the whole paragraph - and, if you want to get crazy, the whole document - to make sure you get the flow of copy, and don't introduce any redundancies. And that's why it's important to read the whole paragraph. Because if you don't, things can get repetetive. Or even redundant.

But her fanciful prose isn't what put me over the edge. It's the fact that she completely fucked the footnote heirarchy. Footnotes are tricky. We use a series of symbols - always in the same order - so that you don't end up with five asterisks in a row, and you can't just sprinkle them around and mix them with end notes. There's a system. It's my job and the proofers' job to know it. That's why we're here.

I don't mind that she doesn't understand how footnotes work. I do mind that she just throws them in there as though she does, merrily sprinkling asterisks and often bumping or moving around other footnotes or endnotes, which are now connected to the wrong thing.

The fantasy involved flying to Colorado, putting her in a headlock, and punching her in the face in time with the words "If you DON'T. UNDERSTAND. FOOTNOTES. Just PUT THEM. INTO. A FREAKING. E-MAIL."

There is no earthly reason I should care about footnotes, this brochure, or this job to such a degree that it hijacks my brain and makes me this snotty.

Time to get out.