In-house comms monkey in tale of woe shocker!

A while back I got a half decent pitch. A high profile speaker at a conference that my firm was organising was willing to put his name to a contributed article.
Now, for all the usual reasons we don’t usually take contributed articles. This one though would be different. The writer, as I said, would be quite senior (I know, I know. He wouldn’t really be writing it, but he’d be putting his name to it, and the readers don’t really care or know that the author would more than likely be some PR flunky or jobbing journo). Not only would the ‘writer’ be fairly senior, but his company is rather large in the industry I cover….and, what’s more, it’d be totally exclusive.

I supplied the PR with some thoughts on an angle, I gave him a nice comfy deadline (about a month) and I said the word count should be 1,500.

Naturally, I’d built some slack into the deadline, so when I go this missive three days after the date it didn’t matter too much – or so I thought:

Hi Finisher,
Please find attached the article. Sorry for being late, but we needed a little more time for validation.
Can you please check if the whole text seems correct for the publication, and then send the modified version back to us for validation?
Thank you
BPR

The fact that the email didn’t have an attachment should have started the old alarm bells a-ringin’. Sadly, I ignored my better judgement and decided to engage...

Leaving it a minute or two, I then emailed the PR to tell him of his schoolboy error. He apologised and then sent through another email with an attachment that contained a one page doc of about 330 words in length.

I read through the four paragraph-long note and deduced that while the PR had at least managed to attach a doc this time, it was clearly the wrong one.

The information before my eyes would not pass for an article in a primary school newsletter. It was a poorly written note describing what the executive would be talking about at a forthcoming conference. I was expecting a 1500 article ‘written’ by a very senior executive at one the world’s most widely recognised brands.

I sent an email that said:

Hi BRP
Thanks for this. I should be able to use it as part of a news story.
I take it you’re not going to submit a full length feature?
Finisher

Imagine my surprise, then, when I got this in return:

Hi Finisher,
The article is more than 1500 words long, do you still have space for some more text?
BPR

I opened the attachment again, was I wrong? Maybe the guy was trying to hypnotise me with barefaced lies. Perhaps my Word’s word count tool was on the blink. But no, 330 words worth of presentation notes sat before me on a single side of A4.

“I think you must have attached the wrong doc.” I said “The one that you sent me is 330 words!”

After a moment or two I got this:

Sorry Finisher i ment 1500 signs, my mistake...
1500 words, as you said in your previous mail, looks like a big article, what else could we talk about? (i hope that we aren' too close to the deadline to discuss about it)
BRP

I decided to throw this chap a bone. He was well past the original deadline, but clearly he had special needs.

Yes, I’m afraid I wanted 1500 words, not 1500 characters!
If you still wanted to write a longer piece, maybe you could talk about your …here I described something relevant to his company that would be extremely easy to write about …. You’ll have to move quickly, the deadline for the feature is the end of this week at the latest.

I admit, I should have dropped this as a lost cause much earlier, but I soldiered. I even attached the full transcript of an interview that I’d carried out with his firm’s CEO a week earlier, suggesting that maybe he could use it for ‘inspiration’.… the following day I got this:

Hi Finisher,

We finally decided to send the [original] article, plus a concise presentation of [the company I work for] (attached file).
Your suggestion is still too recent to deal with it, although it is an interesting article idea.

PS: Can you please find an attractive title to the article? And then send the final edit back to us, before publication?

Many thanks

BPR

The attached file containing a “concise presentation” of his firm was, in fact, a press release boilerplate pasted into Word.

I was gobsmacked. He seriously thought that adding his firm’s boilerplate info to the 330 words of notes already sent late would make for a compelling article. Not only that, he wanted me to think of an “attractive” headline AND, get this, send it back so they could check it.

Jeeeeeeeee-zuzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz