Shitty and shittier

This is the time of year I like to call "the closing of the flood gates". We're ramping up for our largest project of the year, and we have to attempt to curtail a lot of the work coming in so we can get through our big project. In a perfect world, this would mean they would find alternative ways to get their stuff printed. Instead, we get everything thrown in at once. It gets pretty chaotic.

This week, my stack of work has been immense. I've been working late, and I'll be working all this weekend to try to get caught up. It's been nearly impossible to make any progress because of two projects.

One of them, at least, offers some closure on a project that's been lingering for months now. However, the project ballooned to five times its orginal size, and they needed it done before they leave for a seminar overseas on Sunday.

When we started this project, they gave me four CDs full of photos to choose from. None of the images were named to give an indication of what the photo was, so when they told me to "just find something that looks cool", I've had to look at them all one by one. Let me further illustrate how frustrating this task really is: A lot of these pictures were taken during a breakfast meeting, and the guy taking the photos took twenty snapshots of his breakfast burrito (enough to do a time-lapse animation)...most of the office shots has at least one person in the background goofing off with a couple of the shots showing the vice-president of the company flexing, and he wanted to use one of those shots for their magazine ad.

Any time new info would come in on this porject this week, I had to drop everything in order to get them a new proof. My boss kept telling the client that I'd have it ready in five minutes, even when it would take me an hour. Any attempt to urge my boss to quit writing checks that my ass couldn't cash was met with the words, "What am I supposed to do, tell them to go to hell?!?"

I swallowed my sarcasm and fought off my temptaion to simply answer, "Yep!". The point I was trying to make is that he's making promises on my behalf that are difficult to keep, and if I succeed, then we're only giving that client unrealistic expectations for whatever ripe slice of hell they bring us next time. They're gonna assume that they can wait until the last minute and expect us to drop everything for them. It's not fair to tell them to go to hell, but all of our other clients are waiting on their stuff, too!

Last night, my boss left to have dinner with his family, leaving me to deal with the clients myself while choking back the fact that I am severly pissed and critically stressed out. I about lost it when I got a call from the client who first debated out loud with herself about the proper way to show their toll-free number for five minutes (1-800 vs. (800) vs. 1 (800), etc.), but then thanked me for staying late "just for her". Yeah, quality is job one, but in this case, it's stinking like number two.

I left work around 9:00 last night, claiming a case of hysterical blindness. I went straight to Arnie's Bar and got drunk.

The other project started out fairly reasonable on Monday. I got a file from the client, it took some time to get it formatted to the way we needed to print it, and I made a proof for them. Later that day, my boss got a call from that client asking whether they should make the changes or should we. He wasn't sure, so he asked me. Not thinking about how much work it took to impose the file for printing, I told them to go ahead and make the changes and send us a new disk.

So, I did all that work again and gave them a new proof. They had a couple of changes, so I did them myself. The trouble was that I had to make the changes twice, once to our imposed file, and once to their file to send them a PDF. They approved the job with those changes, so I got it ready to go on the press. An hour later, they called back with more changes, so I ran more plates. Today, they called back four more times, each time needing a new PDF and requiring me to run more plates.

What kind of changes were these? In these long lists of names in the layout, many of the names were not in proper alphabetical order! The ironic thing is, this project was for a university! These people are in higher education, and they can't even alphabetize a list of donors' names properly. The last of those changes was juxtaposing two names, both of which were next to each other in the list, and both of which were listed as deceased. I'm all for making things right, but it not like those two people were gonna notice!

Somehow, I managed to get some other work done when I wasn't having to deal with these people.