pretty much how it went for every interview i ever had… 😒
unique skills
Category Archives: chaos at work
invisible formatting
when i was working at the print shop in issaquah, prior to my injury, i had a customer who always provided their own “artwork” for the print jobs they wanted. the problem was that this customer used Quark eXpress (which all the GOOD customers used) but he used the “faux” formatting from the toolbar — which is okay if you are printing from a local, computer-printer, but not if you’re sending it out to a print service — rather than using the “correct” formatting, by selecting the proper typeface from the menu.
what this meant, was that, inevitably, i would, either, have to reset the entire piece, or go through the artwork — sometimes character by character — to reset all of the faux formatting he had done.
i was really impressed that this guy was actually able to use the proper program for this, but it irritated THE HELL out of me that he couldn’t learn to do this one, TEDIOUS, TIME-CONSUMING, job correctly, so that i wouldn’t have to second-guess him all the time.
finally, i had enough.
i copied the entire piece, and pasted it just outside the page, on what they call the “pasteboard”. it’s usually not a place for permanent storage, but a place that it’s convenient to store blocks of type during formatting (so that you don’t have to type them more than once). if you do it correctly, it effectively doubles the size of the document, but there is no obvious flag which indicates the location of “the rest” of the document. if you “zoom out”, it’s obvious, but most people don’t “zoom out” larger than the page size, so it’s effectively hidden.
the first couple of times i did this, he didn’t notice, because he already had a relatively old, slow computer… but after a while of my doing this on the same document, he started noticing that this particular document took FOREVER to load, and it took EVEN LONGER to save, once he had made changes.
the last time i saw him, which was just before my injury, he was complaining about “his computer”. he said that he would double click the document, and then go away for an hour and do other stuff, and when he came back, sometimes the document would be loaded… 😈
this…
exactly why i am eternally grateful to whatever force put that brain-injury in my head so that i no longer am forced to put up with this kind of horseshit:
——
Client: I want a big image of the director prominently displayed on the main page of the website, front and center, about this size.
Client sends me an 800×600 image of the director in a stern, unsmiling pose, staring straight ahead.
Me: I don’t think that’s a good idea. That image is going to completely dominate the front page and gives a very unsettling “Big Brother” look.
Client: Big Brother? Who is that?
Me: Erm, it’s a reference from a very famous book about totalitarianism.
Client: I don’t know what that means, but I like the term “Big Brother”, it reinforces the “family” feel we are trying to portray. Please go ahead and put the image on the front page. Thanks.
— Clients From Hell
——The client wanted an advertising poster done by the 1st of May. I had informed them in advance that I would be gone on holiday in the 1st week of April. This is the phone call I received the evening before I was to depart with still a lot of preparation for the trip that needed to be done.
Client: Listen, you have to help me. There’s been a mistake. The poster has to be finished by Tuesday.
Me: What happened to the 1st of May?
Client: Yeah, you see, I sort of misread my boss’ intentions. Apparently it has to be printed and distributed on that date.
Me: I’m afraid I’ll be on a holiday until Friday, starting from tomorrow morning. I told you this in advance.
Client: Yeah, I know. But it’s not as if you have a stressful job right? I mean, it’s just making some illustrations and adding some text. You could easily do that by the pool or at some table by the bar. If my boss finds out about this mistake I will have a very stressful job.
— Clients From Hell
——
Time for a guaranteed income?
Time for a Guaranteed Income? — this is the first step towards The RICH Economy, which i have been promoting for 20 years or so. nobody’s actually done it yet, but the fact that sweden is voting on it soon is definitely a step in the right direction…
although the author of this article doesn’t seem to think too highly of the concept… at least she isn’t dismissing the idea outright…
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs – i have an “excuse”: i am “disabled” and thus eligible for SSDI (which isn’t a walk in the park, even after i qualified for it, which was 5 years after my injury). but even if i weren’t “disabled”, i would probably NOT be “working” — in the traditional sense of the word — anyway, simply because so many of the jobs that i could obtain are “bullshit”…
now, here’s another point of view…
must… resist… urge… to… kill…
"I can’t watch the video you sent me cause it’s mp4. Can you send it in mp3?"
— Clients From Hell
i’ve heard that before… from an employer… and it’s all i can do to not email that employer RIGHT NOW and figuratively strangle him until his eyes bug out, for uttering such inane drivel, despite the fact that i haven’t actually been employed by this particular IDIOT for at least 5 years… 😡
this is why i don’t have a job any longer
the scary part is that the guy in frame #2, and the technical recruiter that i dealt with for a few years when i was working in the computer industry, bear a frightening resemblence to one another…
& stuff
when you’re unemployed/unemployable/disabled, you get to a point where it doesn’t matter whether it’s the weekend or not. for me it comes down to working and doing what i do anyway, regardless of what day it is, or facing the possibility of even deeper depression because of the fact that i’m not really doing anything to bring income into the house. i’m a wage slave even when i deliberately try to remove myself from the cycle of wages and slavery.
along the same lines, i got a notice from the “Office of Disability Ajudication and Review” about my disability case the other day. a person who has never met me and knows nothing about me is going to decide whether or not i actually am “disabled”. thrill. if they decide that i am, then i’ll get disability retroactively from the time i first had my injury, a portion of which i will then have to fork over to the attorney who has sat there doing nothing for 2 years while the government decided to pull their collective thumb out of their ass and do something about it. if they decide i’m not disabled, then life continues exactly as it has been, except there is no further possibility of my being able to get disability from the government, ever. at this point, it’s still a 50/50 shot, which doesn’t make me feel particularly good about the chances.
meanwhile, i’ve been working hard on feeding the database, and i’ve run out of photos, which means that i’ve got to run another batch of product through the GIMP before going any further. i get the impression that i’m getting fairly close to being finished enough to go live with it, but there’s still darkness at the end of the tunnel. at this point, i don’t know if it’s because there’s still a long way to go, or if it will just be night when i reach the end.
the fremont philharmonic played at a benefit concert for HonkFest West at the Lo-Fi on friday. it went really well, despite having a substitute trumpet player. we had random dance/movement art going on while we played, including one piece that had a woman stripping, which was excellent. she said afterwards that she had only worked to a live band once before, and that we had blown them out of the water and wants to work more with us, which is amazing and exactly what i want to do – and it’s not because she’s a stripper, it’s because strippers always seem to have work, and if there’s money to be made, i wanna be a part of it.
moisture festival coming up. there’s a possibility that the circus contraption band has stolen april 1st from us, but i don’t know for sure.
another victory against wage slavery!
well, i’m back from troy’s with 500 business cards for NBAC, and now i know all the juicy details about why troy quit MMP. apparently there have been substantial changes happening that i didn’t know about. bart is now “general manager”, which means that instead of being back in the press room, being useful, he’s now up front, surfing the net and goofing off. bart says that he’s going to “do something” about the fact that numerous jobs have been going on the press without being spell checked and okayed by the customer (i actually used to have a proof stamp, that had to be initialled by the customer before i would put jobs on the “to-be-printed” pile – that stamp disappeared shortly after my injury [i suspect carl was behind it], and when i got out of the hospital, nobody knew where it was). troy was tired of taking flak for it, and complained to bart, but bart was apparently too busy surfing the net and goofing off to do anything about it once he left the press room. finally, one of the new (sales)girls came back and read troy the riot act for printing a job that hadn’t been proofread, and he told her to eat shit and die. when mike told troy to apologise to her, troy told mike to eat shit and die, and walked out.
good for him. it wasn’t enough that he was working from 3:00 am because of where he lives, and it wasn’t enough that he was only making $17 an hour when the industry standard for a press operator with his experience is more like $30 an hour, he shouldn’t have to put up with taking the blame for doing stuff that wasn’t his fault to begin with. of course this means that now bart will either be forced back into the press room, or he will have to hire a new, presumably competent press operator who is willing to work for $17 an hour.
also, apparently, mike is under the impression that quark xpress has been purchased by microsoft. i don’t know where he got that idea from, but it was probably from sharon, who is doing my job now, and who hates quark, despite the fact that it is consistently more reliable than adobe.