Proofing

It’s been said that the only constant at PlattForm is change.

One can see this in the small things like the weekly hunt for any given Client Services’ member’s new office, and big things like the semi-frequent promotions and continual process changes.

It’s everything from a battle over e-mail vs. email to taking on entirely new tasks and making them second nature. PlattForm and the people who work here are malleable. We work with challenges and step forward to affect changes that cause ripples elsewhere.

This has never been so apparent as over these past few days, during one of the tougher weeks I’ve had in a long time. It’s true that proofing can be a thankless job. Sometimes, since we are behind the scenes, people forget that we have a part in the creative process. Sometimes that leads us to think that what we do doesn’t have an effect somewhere else.

So, what’s a manager to do? Round up the troops and remind them of the chain reaction everything creates. Of the vital importance each action has on things they might not even begin to imagine. In hindsight, reference Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder.

Self-worth can alter many things – job satisfaction, quality of work, quality of life, relationships, ambition and more. I see the beginnings of this already – a banding together of a team that may have lost its place a little; a renewed confidence that the job we do is one that can transform things.

It’s not so much that we need to remember to always affect change, but more that change always affects.

There are some strange debates that find their way into the confines of the Proofing office. Recently, a rather heated discussion sprang to life after our rule to include a hyphen in “e-mail” was questioned by an outsider. Thus, the debate began about whether the hyphen should remain: e-mail vs. email. To most normal people, hyphens fit snugly into that category of just below ‘obscure meaninglessness’ Much like the protective seal on a can of peanut butter – the hyphen serves it’s purpose best in those brief moments where it can be disposed of, or at least ignored, and then forgotten. But, to me, where you fall on this issue is the equivalent to choosing your political affiliation. So, on which side do you stand?

Since its inception, e-mail has been spelled with a hyphen. It does, after all, represent two, separate words. However, it has become trendy with the kids to go around dashing hyphens right and left – without any justification. (Oh, that was intended!) I seem to remember a similar approach to grammar in Orwell’s 1984. The goal of Big Brother was to simplify language and make sure everyone was super depressed about it. Unneeded words and letters were removed for efficiency sake.

Now, the hyphen, many would argue, is not a very sexy or exciting appendage of the English alphabet. However, I beg to differ. The hyphen represents a bridging of two worlds. “Electronic” representing the new frontiers made available by the expansion of the Internet – and “mail”, which represents the old-world of slow, inefficient snail mail delivery by human hands/feet. Those brave, hardworking individuals at the U.S. post office are trudging forward to this day, in their fight to get us our various generic mailings and credit card offers. Let me put it to you this way. Which brings you more joy – seeing an e-mail pop onto your screen, or receiving a personally-addressed envelope in your real, physical mailbox?

Removing the hyphen from e-mail would equate to rigging this bridge to our past with an unreasonably huge arsenal of explosives and blowing it straight to hell. These anti-hyphenists must realize that they are calling for nothing less than the elimination of our identity as human beings! This dependence on the old, slow method of communication must be honored by the new, digital era. Snail mail paved the long, hard road which electronic mail owes it’s livelihood to. And the least the electronic world can do is to symbolically retain this essential historic link, so that our children will never forget where their little bleeps of code came from. So when I am a grandfather I can tell stories about way back when – before we all became digitized and downloadable. Before the polar caps melted, and we all swam into the binary abyss of the nonphysical realm, where thousands of single-sentence, partial-thought messages beamed directly into our cortex on the hour, every hour, for the rest of our lives.

Here’s to the future! 100000111010111111111000001111001011000000110000

So, the proofing department might possibly have a reputation for being sticklers: pretty rigid about our proofing changes and as overprotective as new parents about grammar and language.

Because of that stigma (and, admittedly, it’s at least partially accurate), I’m proud of us for how well we’ve handled the complete overhaul of … well … everything we do in the past few months.

They have been mostly minor changes so far, with the exception of our new company network that will eventually house pretty much everything everybody does (It’s a monster that just keeps growing), but about three weeks ago our department changed its name and pulled in some new members, including a Director of Operations, Brian, whose primary job responsibility is to increase efficiency and trim the fat off of every single process in every single department.

I threw all caution to the wind and eagerly jumped on Brian’s bandwagon. I presented several ideas to him. He liked those ideas, so we pulled in the heads of the creative teams they’d be affecting. They liked our ideas, too. Now, to tell our respective teams.

At our proofer meeting the afternoon after we discussed these changes with the creative team heads, I broke the exciting news and really shook things up: In short, we’re cutting out a considerable amount of proofing. We’re reestablishing ourselves as a team that double-checks creative to make sure there aren’t any errors rather than a team that corrects all errors through to completion. We want to help the creative teams take real pride and ownership over their work and reduce the frustration that comes from delivering a print ad back and forth time after time after time. From a department that used to check changes through until a piece of creative was completely error-free, this was shocking news – I even got a dropped jaw in response, which I tend to think of as a dramatic movie reaction.

But it’s had a few days to sink in now, and I think that, come Monday when we put this into action, we’ll all be ready to go and explore new ground. And as Brian and I work with other teams, more big changes will happen and more jaws will drop.

And then we’ll adapt, because in PlattForm’s proofing department, we don’t rest on good enough. We strive for excellence, even when it means changing everything we know.

Rigid sticklers … pffft.

by Ryan McBee

For those of you who are not in the know, the Proofers are now known exclusively as The ProoFTrooP. The ProoFTrooP was born out of the depths of the grammatical core. Arranged by the mysterious forces of Stet and Syntax, and formed over millions of years of intense heating and cooling, we have risen up from the bowels of the earth to establish a sense of order in an otherwise chaotic PlattForm world.

The haunting of the ghost Aunt Jemima was noted by the ProoFTrooP several months back when we first caught “wind” of her. The ghost of Aunt Jemima operates in a very peculiar manner. Her presence is not so much felt as it is smelt – around and within the ProoFTrooP headquarters. Intelligence reports and various covert operations organized by the ProoFTrooP have revealed many disturbing details about this sticky soul.

She sweeps the halls of PlattForm with no sense of control or regard for her pungent odor and its effects, and the ProoFTrooP continue to battle against her attempts to distract PlattFormers from their work – putting thoughts of IHOP and other maple-oriented activities into our collective head. But we march onward into the piles of content and client revisions, even as she attempts to make our arms stick to dockets and sends breakfast-filled gusts of her sweet-scented haunting … anything to keep us from our work. Even the Ghost Hunters won’t touch this one … its too sticky.

The latest field reports indicate that Jemima is no longer contained exclusively by syrupy smells. On July 12, there were several reports of her haunting the QA/PR/BI hallway with the sizzlin’ smell of fake bacon (facon), and there are rumors that she has had a history of such transformations into other breakfast-oriented aromas.

However, On Friday the 13th, Jemima took the all-too-obvious opportunity to make a quantum leap into an overwhelmingly onion realm. This was a signal that Jemima is becoming more aggressive (and a bit cliché), and that her hijinks can no longer be tolerated. The ProoFTrooP is currently coordinating with BI to remove her, once and for all.