Woo, scholarly publishing! Give your production editors a hug from me, too -- that's gotta be a tough job. Man, I cannot imagine how hard it must be to run production on stuff like that. (You do textbooks? Or... what?)

I have never sabotaged a book (no matter how tempted I've been) -- it's my line too. But I am not worried about being polite when someone is nasty to assistants. Or me. I am very public (within my company) about it, and people are always surprised -- they say, "You too? S/he did that to me!"

Sharing information is never a bad thing, IMO.