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It was a fairly rough week at work and Friday was no exception. There are things happening in the office that are taking certain levels of control out of my hands. Not that my job is getting scaled back at all, it's a technology issue. The new policy is that we're phasing out film output in favor of direct-to-plate for our large 4-color press. We will now only be running film for small corrections for jobs that we've already been using film on. To this end, we're having to farm out our large press files to our output bureau. Printed proofs are costly, so whenever possible we have the output bureau send us PDF's of the final pieces.

Like, I said, it's taking a little getting used to. One job had all of the text showing up in rich black (100% of cyan, magenta, yellow and black) on three out of four pages and just plain black. If it had been rich black on all four pages, we would've been fine, we would've just run the ink that heavy. This one was technically the client's fault. They gave us a file that way, and with a PDF composite proof, there was no way for us to see the problem until we got the plates, however, we can't bill them for it. There went our profit margin on that job.

Another job proved troublesome by the fact that I didn't zoom in close enough on the PDF proof to see that the text was all jagged and bitmapped. I notified the output bureau and told them to only re-output the black plates. They re-ran the whole damned job. Today, my boss called me with yet another problem on the job, which would require yet another plate.

Needless to say, I'm not looking forward to Monday morning.

Last night, I wasn't happy. I wasn't good company. And Candy wanted to invite over her new suitor. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a problem, but I just wasn't in the mood to be around people. So, I left for a few hours. I drove around for a while. I stopped at Borders and picked up a CD (Elvis Costello's King of America) that proved to be one of the worst CDs to listen to when you're the least bit depressed. It's a great CD, but not under these circumstances.

I considered going to see a movie. I was considering Brokeback Mountain, just to see what the buzz was all about, but then I remembered working at that movie theater and knowing what goes on in the back of those theaters on Friday and Saturday night regardless of the movie (I had to clean up a used condom after a showing of SHREK of all movies), PLUS the subject matter of that particular movie...and seeing the movie alone...all that combined together and made me reconsider. Not that I'm completely secure in my sexuality, it just that I get unnerved when people just TALK in the theater. So, I just drove around for most of the night.

Given the chance that Candy's date would be going well, I stayed out until about midnight and called before I headed home. They had both fallen asleep by ten, so the last two hours of driving were for nothing.

Today I feel better. Still not in full social mode, but maybe having to work the door at Arnie's tonight will remedy that.