OFA coffee table book, part 16

Late last night when I was preparing the previous entry, I took some time off from my work on The Old Frees' Association coffee table book to post a short entry in twitter and facebook that I've never been gladder for the extra day that the 29th of February had given me this year!

One extra day means one more day of breathing space for the book! And it came in handy today as I've uploaded to the layout designer's server almost the final batch of essays. What's left now is the preparation of the Acknowledgement page and awaiting the three VVIPS to give us their messages.

Actually we did receive a message from the Chief Minister's office but I was rather aghast on receiving it. His staff had made several changes to the draft that we had offered to him and these changes had come back to us with all sorts of mistakes. Missing words. Wrong use of words. Unhyphenated words. Obviously, the person in charge of the message at the CM's office had done a sloppy and hurried job. Worse, the message had already been signed by you-know-who. Is he so confident about the output of his staff that he himself doesn't read what he signed?

After a brief discussion with the OFA president, we decided to ask the CM's office for a freshly signed message with all the grammatical mistakes corrected. So sorry, the lady there replied me, we shall have to wait for the CM to return from KL before the new message can be signed.

In desperation I contacted a close friend and former colleague who is working in the CM's office. I say, I told him, I needed his help to push matters through. Hrumpp, he told me that the "CM did his own editing and he is very particular of changes." I couldn't resist replying to him: "You should know by now that I'm VERY particular about the correct usage of the English language but if he insists that we retain these silly mistakes, we'll have no choice but to go ahead with them. But just remember that we don't want to embarrass him."

That will kick some ass, I hope, but we still have to wait until Monday latest. Time is really running out!!!