The Last Giveaway!

Hi there,It's hard to believe, but Is This Working? will be on bookstore shelves in less than two weeks! This time last year, I'd just finished signing my author contract and was trying to wrap my head around the fact that I was supposed to finish a book manuscript by September.To celebrate the end of preorder season, I'm doing one more giveaway: this time, I want stories of memorable workplace mistakes. Full details are here (and you can enter just by replying to this email).One of my own biggest whuupses happened back when I was responsible for arranging our Dean's business travel. I was putting together her itinerary the day before the trip, and when I got to the "hotel info" part, I realized, oh crap, there is no hotel info. Because I never made a reservation. Fortunately I managed to book a last-minute room at a non-exorbitant rate, and no one was ever the wiser. (Hi, old bosses—hope that statute of limitations has expired!) So in the end it was fine, but it still makes my blood run cold when I remember it.More recently, we realized after submitting a grant that we’d all misread the instructions and had submitted a single-spaced proposal instead of a double-spaced one—which is kind of a big deal when you’re dealing with a strict page limit and a deadline that’s already passed. Somehow we managed to trim the proposal down to half its original length in an amazingly short amount of time, and the funder let us resubmit the corrected version. (It would be nice if this story ended with, "and then we got the grant!" but alas, we did not.)What's your own favorite cringe-at-the-memory moment? I'm really looking forward to reading these entries!~court, AKA BusinessladyP.S. Now that I got my box o' books from the publisher, I don't have to use the standard flat cover image for every single thing I post. Here's a behind-the-scenes outtake from this morning's photo shoot: