OT: Oh HELL no! I did what? And it's MY fault too?

For the last 8 weeks, a colleague and I have been working on a proposal for a panel presentation at a professional conference next year on a very complex topic involving patent law and biosimilars legislation.  (We don't have to do this, but it would be a good way to make a little bit of a name for ourselves with our peers as well as potential clients - and we've been talking about writing a paper on the topic for a couple of years, with no sign of either of us making any progress, so this was a good excuse/prodding.)  We are novices - neither of us has previously submitted a proposal for this venue before.  We were working from instructions issued by the organization, which gave guidelines about what was necessary for submission, which was to be submitted via an internet form.

We have been wordsmithing this damned document ENDLESSLY, but finally, last night, it was ready to go.  The final date for submission is Friday, but since we were finished, I wanted to get it over and done with.  So I signed up and logged on to the site.

And discovered that what I thought, what my colleague thought, and even the contact I have at the organization *****viewed it for us didn't notice, about the required length of each part of the submission was "slightly" off.

For the Description of the presentation, what I read as "1000 word" limit was in fact "1000 CHARACTERS."  Our presentation, which was nowhere NEAR 1000 words long, was over 5000 characters.  Our Methodology and Objectives sections were similarly waaaaay the hell overly long.

OMFG.  Our brilliant proposal, lovingly crafted words, paragraphs, bullet points - I had to chop them to pieces to fit in that limited format.  I nearly cried.  Oh, and my colleague is on the east coast, so I couldn't call him for help - I just decided to sla**** and rewrite it myself, try to keep the main points, and let my colleague review it later.  Fortunately, I could save it in draft form, and we still have a few days.

But not only that, there were additional sections required that were NOT specified in the instructions (in order to even save a draft, I had to give it a title, and at this conference, you are supposed to have a funny, catchy, smart title that will bring people in the door for 90 minutes), and we had to NAME the panelists (I don't even know if our presentation will be accepted - only about 1 in 5 are), and I hadn't spoken to anyone yet!  So I also had to write emails to the people I had vaguely in mind, and formally invite them (and in one case, try to find her email address, because she had left her firm recently), and beg them to give me an answer for NEXT JUNE, right now, about whether they could be experts on a subject that they were just now reading about.  Oy.

And one expert for the panel I had in mind, who changed jobs, is probably not going to be available.  Yay.  Fortunately, I mentioned this to another attorney today, and got hooked up with another expert.  And he's done panels before, and agreed to review the proposal, so I guess it will be OK.

Anyway, it was right there in front of me - 1000 CHARACTER limit.  I was SURE it said 1000 words.  I was careless.  I suppose if I had thought about it for a moment, it was not reasonable that they would want 3 page long descriptions from hundreds of people, but -

Well, there's no but.  It was my fault.  I can be pissed all I want, but there you go.  There's a few dozen hours of my life I'll never get back.

What have you done (we all have more than one) where you screwed up something awful, and it mostly screwed yourself, and you had pretty much NOBODY to blame but yourself - so you can't even take it out on anyone else??  I did want to smack myself pretty good for this - and because I'm doing a round of Flagyl right now, I couldn't even have a drink after I finished working on it at 2 AM.  Bah.

 You completely have my sympathy. Anyone could have done it, especially when you had in the back of your mind the idea of writing  a paper. Well, you wrote one! Maybe you can find another venue for your wordcrafting so that it doesn't go to waste.

The most embarrassing blooper I ever pulled was when I was in nursing school. I had had quite a lot of success in the prerequisite classes, often pulling in more than the total number of points for a class, once any extra credit was considered. I ended up tutoring a lot of my classmates, and getting a little bit of a name for myself. After having never excelled at anything before like that, I think it got my head swelled a bit. Well, I worked my ass off in actual nursing school, keeping up my success and reputation. I was the one who blew the curve for the rest of the class by consistently getting 100% on difficult exams. 

The strain finally caught up with me, when we started our psychiatric rotation, and I had a nervous breakdown. It had brought up suppressed memories of abuse from my childhood that I was having a very hard time dealing with. But that's not the worst part. In the fog of being suicidally unable to cope anymore, I went to the area hospital to get help. I was admitted into the psych unit, never thinking that about half of my classmates would start their psych rotation in that same unit, in about a week! 

So there I was, in my most vulnerable glory, making puzzles and coloring pictures while my classmates politely avoided contact with me in a relatively small suite of rooms! The hospital staff were careful to put my chart, with all of my sensitive information, in the med room when the students were there, so that they could not get access to my private thoughts and information. To top it all off, I was inducted into the international nursing honor society (as a sophomore - a rare honor) while I was in there, and could not attend the ceremony! They brought me the papers and the pin while I was in the psych unit! How embarrassing!

I really did need to be in the hospital, and there is nothing wrong with going for help when you need it, but when the time comes, it really helps to pick a psych ward where everyone you know won't come parading in to learn, two times a week for an entire semester, LOL!!!!!

Wondered where you have been!

Filed my appeal late to Aetna to get back my $13,000 for DS surgery.  I had 6 months and I was a few days too late.  I miscounted the days.  On my behalf I was taking care of my mom while she was on life support at the time.  I still kick myself. 

The original post in this thread has 712 words.

HAH!  I figured out how to show characters in Word!

The original post has 722 words, according to MY computer, and 3845 characters, counting spaces as characters.  I learned a new trick today.

Geek!  (or smarta$$?)  LOL

Not mutually exclusive descriptors, are they?


(You and Tracy are so much fun I'd ALMOST go through TX on my way somewhere just to say, "Hey."   But I REALLY don't want to go to Texas....it's the hottest, coldest, wettest, dryest place I've even been...and too, too flat.)

I can relate.  But I screw up things much worse than a professional proposal.  I screw up the really big things.

Sorry for your big screw up and all the time you spent and that you are beating yourself up.  Hopefully you can use some of the work you did in the actual presentation somehow so it isn't completely wasted.

I have had a beer while taking flagyl.  What is supposed to happen?

~Becky

I snuck in beer between doses yesterday with dinner (hours after the AM dose and 4 hours before my next dose). 

Some people react to alcohol while on Flagyl (metronidizole) similarly to how they would if they had taken Antabuse.  I don't know if I do, and I don't WANT to know.  Since I usually have a 1/2 glass of port before bed, and take my 2nd dose of pills each night right before bed, and since I do not want to find out if taking them close in time causes nausea and puking, I am laying off the port for 10 days.  There's more alcohol in it in a concentrated dose, and I tend to still sip my drinks anyway, so drinking beer with a meal is less likely to affect me.

And yes, the long version is actually useful for sending to the potential panelists, because it is more detailed.  But still ...