Current mood:

thankful

Everyone blends the personal with the professional on occasion. There are times though when a huge, huge wall should raise up between them. Twice in two days I learned this lesson.

The UConn Huskies basketball team lost in the NCAA tourney to a lower ranked rival. Moments after sitting on the edge of my seat for lord knows how long, I turned to my email account and instinctively replied to a message. The message was about edits to an accepted journal article that a co-author and I have been working on for a long, long time. I wanna get rid of the stinky thing. You know, move on to something else. With that lurking in my psyche mixed with a dose of UConn-loss frustration, I whip out a message to my co-author that says something like this: "Soon we will finally get to move on from this piece. How do you suggest we divide it up?" My little booboo is that the email gets sent not to my co-author, but the Editor Grand High Poobah in Chief of the Journal. My fingers have barely left the keyboard and I'm already in a panic. Fortunately, a friend is nearby to calm me down and say 'dude, it was not that bad, really. Why are you fussin'?' After some weak protest I put aside the lame apology I am about to write out and move on. If I was feeling really cranky, I could have written something a whole lot worse. Teaches me somethin' don't it.

The second booboo could have been far worse. This morning I posted about a video reviewer for PC games online, commenting that he focuses too much on pre-teen sexual humor. Somehow a piece of that comment of that post wound up stored in my CRTL-C copy command. You know, press CTRL-X and you copy material for pasting somewhere else.

Fast forward 30 minutes. I am making rapid fire edits to a paper I am about to submit with a very tight deadline. Lots of cutting. Lots of pasting. In my haste I must have pressed paste before using the cut feature I wanted to use. Soo... you guessed it ... my comment about the video game reviewer wound up smack in the middle of my scholarly article on false advertising. It kind of looked like this: 

"The most rigorous standing rule appears in the Seventh, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits (Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and fifteen western states). These circuits have adopted what is commonly known as the “categorical approach.” Federal courts in these states have required that the plaintiff must be in actual or direct competition in order to pursue a deceptive advertising claim under the Lanham Act. Shed of his annoying fixations with female body parts and repetitive juvenile commentary (although he just couldn't resist drawing a penis could he?), the review comes to the fore. This is the only test that requires the plaintiff to show that it is in direct competition with the defendant in order to sue the defendant under federal deceptive advertising laws (McCarthy, 2008). This approach excludes indirectly competing firms and non-competing firms from obtaining redress. For example, in Halicki v. United States (1987)..."

 
I barely spotted it.  After seven hours of straight editing, words just start to fuzz together.  I was all ready to send the piece out for publication.  Heck, I've been working on this thing for hours, who needs to read it again one last time?  Pfft. Not me.  Nope.

Personal.  Professional.  Oil. Water.