My job here at Oskars has hit the point in the pre-publication cycle that I always dread the most. We’re just about done with the issue we’ve been slaving over for the past few weeks and have all the big stuff out of the way.

Now, we’re doing the little — albeit important — stuff: making sure the quotation marks are the correct type (the system has four varients we can chose from), triple-checking names and phone numbers, making sure lines haven’t disappeared from the end of stories, that sort of thing.

Heading up the English side of a German publication has made this a little more interesting than normal; since everybody else on staff in German, I often end up having to make some sort of call on things like punctuation and wording. Since they’re professional journalists as well, though, I have to have good reasons for whatever I come up with — hence surfing the web for half an hour today to prove that the proper abbreviation for microphone is “mic,” not “mike.”

Oh, yeah, it’s a hard life. But you don’t want to hear about the fight I had as to whether full sentences after colons should begin with a capital letter. That got ugly.

OK, so, not so funny today. But, hey, all the commas are in the right place — and if they aren’t, I really don’t want to hear about it.