I do some proofreading for the Asian Development Bank — not a lot, but some, and I had risen up in the ranks in a short amount of time. Really doing well at it and was riding high. I did this paper that took a load of rewriting which I did and sent back into the office. Basically, I fix the errors and make comments and then they send it back to the author. Well, this time, the author sent it back to me, but didn't track the changes he had made (or only tracked some of them). I was supposed to look and see if he addressed my comments, which I did and sent the paper back. Then, I get this email from my boss that basically said that there were a lot of basic errors still in the text and they thought I was good proofreader for them, but basically this was bush league work, etc. I looked it over again and sure enough, when I returned the paper, it was okay, but it came back with a lot of errors edited into it. Now, I should have caught this, but in the past, I just check the comments and go on. This time, however, a lot of what had been added in was wrong. And I didn't pick it up. Now I'm wondering if I did myself in and I'm back on the bottom of the totem pole. This was not a lot of money for us, but it was a little bit. And it was greasing the wheels.
I hate making mistakes like this, especially when I get comfortable. I hate making excuses about it, even when it's not entirely my fault. I hate saying, I made some mistakes, but he made a lot more. Ugh. Just a shitty feeling all around.
Another shitty feeling was looking over our finances for the last year. Since we moved to the UK last year, we did very little as far as managing our money went: just left it where it was. Well, if you hadn't heard, there was a huge meltdown last year and our Japanese portfolio took a bad, bad hit, I guess. In 2007, basically I invested all the money I had made as an English teacher (which was quite a bit at the time) in some mutual funds. It was going well in 2007, I think we had made a profit, but in the autumn of last year, when the economy tanked, so tanked our funds. I haven't paid any attention to it, but apparently, since this time last year we are down like 36% which is significant. The good news is that it pays dividends, so it's not quite that bad and we have recouped some of the loss and we didn't sell anything. The funds are up about 26% in the last three months, which is good news, but we're nowhere near back to where we were. So, I need a strong Euro to help us out. Or, if nothing changes and we get our little dividend every month, we will recoup everything in about 11 and half years.
What a shitty, shitty, shitty day.