Attention, all of you struggling to meet your word count this Friday when you should be drinking apple cider and starting your weekend. Misery loves company. On the bulletin boards, I asked folks what their worst assignment ever was.

"Mine was a trial assignment for a book publisher to see if I'd take on a freelance editing job. It involved taking transcripts from interviews and editing them into a book chapter. I thought it was simple enough, but the interview I was given was with some tech guy rambling on and on who made no sense whatsoever. It was a mess of TOO MANY WORDS and gobbledygook. I spent several hours on the piece and it still didn't make sense to me though I did my best. Turns out I didn't get the gig, but was so relieved."

"I was asked to write a travel guide in about three weeks. After two weeks, the editor asked where the copy was. The contract I had said specifically when the piece was due, a week later. I stayed up all night putting together the final piece, which I never proofread. On top of it, I got paid about 15 cents a word and they took money out for a wire transfer. About a week after I submitted, one of the hotels I wrote about went out of business and I never told them. Plus, I never saw the final book. I will never do that again. Awful."

"Got an assignment from editor ''Joe'' that was interesting, but very little structure. Still, I was comfortable with the subject matter, did several long long-distance (read: expensive) interviews, and wrote a heck of an article. I turned the piece in a day or two before deadline. So far, it was a dream job.

AFTER I turned it in, Joe tells me that his boss, ''Marge,'' needed to see a detailed outline first, including my 'proposed' interview subjects. I laughed, and told him that he should just give her the finished piece and see what she thought. No, Joe was too afraid of the rules, so I had to go back and do a format-specific outline of the finished article. Marge changed the outline in a way that was impossible, given the nature of the subject--it would have required breaking the rules of science to adapt to her requested version. I argued, Joe relayed Marge's arguments back (I was never allowed to talk directly to Marge).

After a couple of weeks of going back and forth with this, Joe made the mistake of including Marge's email address on one of his notes. I sent my original article to Marge directly, copying Joe on the email. She loved it. It was a heck of an article...but she didn't understand why I didn't get it in by the deadline. Joe never stood up for me, but said I had used the extra time to ''tweak'' the article. I never took another assignment from Joe."

"My worst assignment was a full time job
I was hired as the Editor of the Main Street News, a weekly newspaper in Connecticut owned by Journal Register. What I wasn't told when I accepted the job was that the folks running the division were in over there heads and did what they wanted to the paper, despite the fact that the readers hated it and were vocal about it. On top of that, writers weren't being paid what they were promised, if at all.

The situation came to a head when I had a disagreement about what should be on the front page of the newspaper and was told ''We don't want news on the front page.'' Later that day, the Executive Editor, Publisher, and Advertising Director, came into the office, let the editorial staff and production staff go, took out the computers, closed the office and changed the locks on the doors and didn't tell the part time staff that the office was gone."