Reversible

I've had some bad bosses, my friends. I've also had a lot of good bosses, but the bad ones are so much more fun to talk about (I believe Leo Tolstoy said something along that line).

One bad boss wasn't my boss for very long. She had a massive crush on some guy in the office, and, when that didn't work out well, she moved across the country to a city where an ex-boyfriend just happened to live.

During the months she supervised me and my confreres, she wasn't a BAD bad boss—no red-faced screaming fits, no head-scratching displays of incompetence. She was just kind of a silly and not terribly involved presence around the cubicles.

And yet she said something exactly right to me, at exactly the right time. I was working on a big book, and the release-to-printer deadline was at hand. "You must be glad to see this one go," she said in an offhand way to me.

I allowed as how I was not.

She expressed surprise. I admitted I was worried I hadn't found every error. I might be releasing a book with errors! I didn't want to let it out of my hands, not yet. If only I could look at it a little bit more. There could be problems I hadn't seen!

"If there are mistakes," she said calmly, "we will fix them."

More than twenty-five years later, I can recall the sense of relief that washed over me.

Here's what I heard: Everyone makes mistakes. They are not the end of the world, even when they're in print (and hardbound). We still have another round of proof, another chance for you to weed out boo-boos. Failing that, errata sheets can be employed. Then there's always the next edition. Mistakes are not the end of the world.

Even I, the most anxious and desperate-to-touch-perfection young professional in a hundred-mile radius, resonated to the wisdom in what she said. I think about it still.

It's just a great mantra for anal, obsessive editors, and the people who supervise them: Work hard, then relax; if there are mistakes, we will fix them. (Feckless, la-di-dah editors, plug your ears. We'll come up with another mantra for you.)

Thank you, bad boss. You may have been my best boss.