When I was a copy editor it used to make me nuts when my editor would swoop in at the last minute, reread some story and rip it apart. I guess my choice of words here makes that apparent. But this would be after five or six people had looked at the copy, it was laid out, captioned and proofed. Then the editor would find a moment to concentrate on the story, find a flaw and go to town. When this happened, I'd try to go with the flow myself, but especially when I managed other copy editors I got to see the size of the rage that flares up. Not only is their own work denigrated, negated, but they also have to deal with running their whole process on it again. And they'd ask me to put a stop to these changes. It wasn't that there physically was no time to do this stuff, though it was a huge inconvenience. It was more that it was off-system.

Now that I am a big cheese I do the exact same thing that used to drive me and my staff up the wall. Now, the editors under me offer reasoned arguments to persuade me not to make changes at late stages. There's a system, there's a time to do this stuff. We have built in this time here, here and here for exactly that. But it's my job, now, not to be locked into the system. There's a time in your publishing career when you must be a believer in the system and know it and enforce it and defend your patch against the forces of anarchy. And be humorless and uncool about any kind of effort, no matter how creative, to get past the system.