I've recently been tasked with making a bunch of edits to some old files for a certain client, and in the process have run into just about every single thing that, as a production designer, really chaps my hide when I have to work on other people's files:
1. Use Quark. It's not 1999 anymore, get over it. If you use the excuse "but all the magazines still use Quark," you're wrong. If you ask them, they'll probably take a PDF, and InDesign makes much, much better PDFs than Quark does.
2. Don't use style sheets. Oh, what a joy it is to have to hand-tool every single instance of headers and captions in your file! You must bill a lot for that. And who cares if the spacing is different on page 2 and page 6? No one will notice. (or will they?)
3. Save all your raster images as EPS. You must really miss Quark 3, 'cus that was the last time raster images had to be EPS to import into a layout. And, you know what? InDesign will actually handle PSDs, with transparency even. Imagine that!
4. Make a bunch of shapes in Photoshop (save them as raster EPS, of course) and use those for your page backgrounds. Because it's so much fun for production designers to have to go in and edit your raster shapes to fit changes to the copy.
5. Make every illustration in your 8-page document in one Illustrator file. Oh, and while you're at it, make sure you embed a lot of hi-res raster graphics in that file. Because everyone loves taking a coffee break while they open your 200 MB EPS so they can make one tiny text change.
6. Don't use columns, or link any of your text boxes. You're only looking at one block of text at a time, why should anyone else want to work with the text as a whole?
7. Use a lot of tabs, spaces and returns to do your formatting for you. Find the enter key to make a column break. (Hint, it's all the way on the bottom right of your keyboard.) Let me introduce you to a little feature called "space before/after." You don't even have to use style sheets to use it! Oh, and by the way, InDesign can actually make tables! No, really.
8. Don't use guides. Because who cares if your objects are aligned to a regular grid? You obviously don't.
9. Convert all your text to outlines. Because we production designers love guessing at what font you used when we have to make a text change. It's like a little game we play to impress each other.
10. And, by all means, never, ever, save the layered version of that monstrous Photoshop job you did. Flatten it and forget about it. Because no one could possibly ever have to make changes to your masterpiece, could they?
Maybe I'm just a bit cranky because both the Finnish national team and the Washington Capitals lost today. But when it takes me 4 hours to make "minor" changes to a 6-page document, that puts me over the edge.
/rant