Still so irritated...

I started to blog about this on Friday after work, then decided I should hold off until I was not so irritated. I didn't want to say anything I might regret, after all. So over the weekend, I mostly tried not to dwell on work and not be so annoyed. But as soon as I started the walk up the hill to the office, all my bad feelings came rushing back.

I've been working on this project at work for months and months. It's a series of patient education handouts for our new moms. And every handout has an accompanying nurse education handout. It has been a HUGE amount of work. And on Friday, I was finally at the end of the project. I had finished every last handout. I had done all the final fact-checking and proofreading. I had assembled everything into compiled PDF files. I had created the proof binders for the printer. I had only a few last things to finish up. I was literally an hour or so from being completely done and out from under this huge project (for a week or two, until I start on phase 3 of the project).

Then... out of nowhere, a battle popped up over the copyright notice. This happened at 6:00 on Friday night. Just as I was finishing everything up. And the CEO came to my office door and told me to stop the printing. Nothing could go to the printer until the copyright battle was resolved.

Basically the problem is thatwe have two branches of our organization - the research people, and the national office. I work for the national office, and we are the ones who put all of this together. We did all the work. The research group didn't so much as touch it. But apparently they have decided that they deserve the copyright on the materials because they created the first version of these materials 10 years ago. Never mind that nothing is close to what they developed. And that more than half of it is completely new that they never even touched. Not to mention, this is hardly the first time they've seen any of these materials. They had to wait until now to decide they had a problem with the copyright (which is the standard copyright notice found on everything developed by the national office)?

But it sounds like they will probably win this battle. Which means that the copyright notice has to be changed. Which means I have to go into every one of over 1,500 documents and adjust the copyright notice. And then do all the PDF, printing, and other things that have to be finalized for the printer all over again. So a couple of weeks of work. On a project that I was so thrilled to be done with. Plus, phase one of this project was published about 6 months ago. With the national office copyright. So that has to be changed, too. Another 900+ files.

Yep, I'm still very irritated. I don't see it going away anytime soon.