After grading many, many assignments by college students this week

[Ms. Toad]

74. I'm guilty of clich here,

but only occasionally, and only in documents to students.

But as long as we're trading war stories - I rarely used anyone in the office I worked in for 13 years to help me prepare documents because - invariably - it took longer for them to prepare them that it took me to do it on my own. This was largely because of the excessive number of back and forth review-fix-review again iterations.

The worst one was a simple documet that was a fillable Word document that needed to be converted to a .pdf before being filed with the trademark office. After several iterations, I thought it was perfect (it looked perfect in Word), but when they converted it to a .pdf, the spacing was off. It took me at least an hour to discover that in order to get rid of an incorrect word in an early version they had changed the font to white, rather than delete it. (By now I forget the details of why it looked fine in Word, but was out of alignment when converted - I just remember the AHA! moment when I discovered it, and being really angry at how much time I'd wasted because the paralegal figured that white font was as good as deleting.)

It was a form that would have taken me about an hour (at most) to type myself - and by the time I got done I had spent close to 3 hours on it. (And because our fees for this particular trademark task were fixed, I lost money on it.)

Then there was the paralegal who hit "enter" at the end of each line, because she didn't understand that Word would automatically flow properly if she just let it do its thing. (She didn't last long.)

That was back in my early days at the firm, before I just told the bosses to forget it - I'd do all my own document preparation. I'd have given my eye teeth for a parlegal who paid careful attention to detail - and looked up how to fix something correctly, rather than just figuring out how to make it superficially look correct.