I've got a great consulting gig.

Part of the work is doing marketing lists, merge/purges,
stuff like that.

My end result is name, address files which get catalogs
mailed to.

They are inhouse or out-of-house people, with a variety
of selection criteria applied to the data to figure
out who to pull.

I have a woman, along with her assistant, that spend a huge
amount of time proofing what I pull.

Out of 40,000 names, they might pull 100, and work their way
through the data, trying to see if I pulled the right stuff.

They will also look at the original data, and make sure it
shows up correctly in my lists.

This is a huge amount of work.

Maybe 1 list out of 20 they find and issue worth asking me about,
and 1 out of 40 they find a real problem, which might have me
modify my selection code, or maybe reformat the inbound data
differently.

Sometimes they find a mistake in a list that we have already
mailed, since the effort might span months.

At that point it is HER fault, not mine. Not that fault really
matters, though. If I can fix something yet to mail, I'll
do it for free, no matter how many hours it takes. If it is
already mailed, I MIGHT eat the cost. Have never gotten to
that point, so I'm not sure.

In one case, I told my boss I was working way too many hours,
and refused to take responsibility for any screwups. Sure
enough, 2 weeks later we found a mistake that cost 20 hours to
fix. I refused to eat the hours, and they accepted that they
pushed too hard.