don't you just hate it?

Do you ever get upset about getting upset over something little?

Today, for instance. I get in to work and pick up this week's paper and the very first thing I see is a mistake -- because it's a pretty blaring one (to me at least). It's the headline on the top story on the front page. Part of it is MISSING. (For techies, I text-wrapped an object around its clipping path on the left hand side, and either the object got slightly shifted or the text got shifted a bit so that the first two words got blocked off.)

Yes, the two words that are missing are miraculously not crucial. It still happens to be a full, appropriate phrase without them. Just a capital letter is missing on the first word, and there's this glaring white space. Part of a cutline is missing, too, which wasn't saved as well, but I don't care about cutlines. I probably misspelled the lady's name, anyhow.

And I'm ticked off. I went and looked at the page before it was PDF'd for production, and it's wrong right there, which means the error was made here and not at the printer's. I looked at my printed copy, and it's still just fine there. Conclusion: it's my co-worker's fault. Obviously he didn't try to do it and is beating himself up because he did. I know he feels terrible and angry. (Although he also doesn't feel as bad because he's blaming it on the incompetency of the printer, who caused him to mess with it at all in the first place.)

So I shouldn't be mad at him. These things happen, and this thing could have been much worse. If a certain part of this woman's name had been cut off, we'd have had problems. Big problems. But I'm ticked! It was a neat set-up, and now I can never use the clipping. And yes, he works too hard already, but if he'd taken one more second to double-check his work, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Why am I so mean? I make mistakes, too, in fact have made a similar affecting someone else's work before. And he does work too hard. But when people see the mistake, I'm the one who will look stupid.

Get a life, Ariel.