Embarrassed

Had a totally embarrassing meeting with my supervisor today. Yesterdays email mentioned that my with blood, sweat & tears produced chapter 3 was 'poorly organised'. This I found odd, because among all the different kinds of critique my work gets, poorly organised has (so far) never been one of them. Today I got back a stack of feedback, written on MY VERY FIRST CUT AND PASTE DRAFT FROM 4 WEEKS AGO. No wonder he thought it poorly organised, that was not organised at all. And full of repeats. And mistakes. And lacking lots of content. After apologising extensively for sending the wrong version (while he was muttering things about precious time, and rightfully so), I staggered out of the room with a bright red face.

About half an hour later it dawned on me: I HAD send the final draft, but did not know how to turn of the 'track changes' (which I use to write notes-to-self on how to proceed the next day, etc). So my supervisor got this document, filled to the brim with 4 weeks of tracked changes. Undoubtfully the word 'chaos' must have come to mind. Clicking on the button 'final' instead of 'final with markup' would have solved this, but how was he to know? He must have clicked on 'reject all changes' and so ended up with what was the very first cut & paste version, and then spend lots of time trying to make something of it (a rather heroic effort I'd say).

Although I blame myself for about 99% for this medium disaster (emailing a document with tracked changes turns out to be a rather stupid action), but one thought did occur to me: why did he not realise I would never hand in a piece like that (full of repeating sentences, double paragraph headings, mistakes, etc) and ask for the right version?