Doing a job wrong...

Sigh, I had worked for this person once in 2012 and was hired again. However, the description of the project was "write an academic paper with personal experiences sprinkled in".

You can't write and academic paper with personal viewpoints sprinkled in. It just isn't proper, but instead of rereading the previous paper I had done for this employer, I attacked the project with careless abandon.

I wrote 2000 words from a very personal point of view, completely ignoring the definitions of the words on this topic. I used general definitions as anyone outside the topic would use them.

To better explain, consider this example: evolutionists/geneticists/ some biologists use the words "highly conserved" when they really mean that the DNA has similar patterning; however, they are using this word to say "these creatures are closely related on the evolutionary chain we have made up".

In general, they are full of it, just as anyone (in my opinion) is full of it when they take a normal sounding word and decide to turn it into something it is not just to sound smarter and exclude others from their conversation. However, had I read the last paper from this employer, I would have known exactly what I needed to do. But, alas, I was in too much of a hurry.

At 2000 words, I got very negative feedback, "well, this isn't working out. It's not going in the right direction. You were great before, but now I am going to hire someone else."

Whoa!! I knew I had messed up big time. I needed this job, I spent tons of time researching this job (well, half-heartedly, but still it took lots of time). I was getting paid good money to do this job with the promise of more nice jobs in the future. I couldn't throw that away, so I asked for a second chance.

Second chances are not the way to go. It's best to just do the job right the first time, no matter how much you are not truly into it. However, my employer was nice (and had already invested a week into the project). I promised to still deliver on deadline - which I did - scrap the paper I had done, and produce exactly what she wanted. It was hard in the end not to look at the paper I had written and steal something to boost my new paper, but I did it without even looking at the first paper. I also learned a lot about the topic - which wasn't a bad topic, I was just trying to do too much at once.

In the end, I kept the employer, but I am writing this as a lesson - don't brush off your really good jobs just because you happen to have a lot on your plate.