Domestic Geek

I had grandiose plans of getting off work this evening and getting a jump on the holiday preparations for tomorrow. *sigh* I should have known better.

I even went in early, made the shopping list of the last few things I needed to pick up on the way home to avoid having to shop anywhere on Friday or Saturday and looked like I was going to be out by 6pm. Then, after everyone in the department had left for the night except me, my supervisor called and told me I needed to work this one job before I left. One of the other operators put it on hold (he shouldn't have, the job is worked the same every danged time it comes in). Of course there was a problem and I needed the supervisor's input and she didn't answer my phone call or email right away. Oh, well.

I was going to bake a cheesecake tonight, but it will have to wait until the weekend.

Ugh, today was not a pleasant day at work.

I wasn't in a bad mood when I got up. I'm not sure exactly when it turned, but shortly after I arrived, I was enraged.

I get tired of the people around me not doing their jobs and not getting in trouble for it. I get tired of supervisors complaining about people not doing their jobs and not firing people. I get tired of customers not having their shit together and wanting to stay on schedule. I get tired of redoing work needlessly. What I do now sucks bad enough without having to do it over and over again. I hate having to sit in department meetings when the topics covered don't pertain to me because I'm doing my stinking job and we wouldn't be having said problems in certain people got fired.

I'm tired of Christmas already. Knock it off people!

I seriously wanted to punch 75% of the people I came in contact with today.

Are the planets aligned weird or something?

On a positive note, the engineer thinks our house/septic/well on the land in South Dakota we looked at is doable. Marcus is going to get a purchase agreement tomorrow to get the bank involved to see if they'll lend and we'll see where we go from there. Really keeping my fingers crossed continuously on this.

I'm going to bed and hoping to get a little knitting in before I nod off. I sure hope tomorrow is a better day.

The department I work in is overstaffed. We have been most of the time I've worked there. I originally asked to go over there because they were majorly understaffed. I thought I was going to be in a department of 3 people. Now we've got 5 (at one point 6). I've spent so much time dragging my feet just trying to get my hours in that its driving me absolutely bat-shit crazy. I've already lost 4 hours this week and that totally sucks since we're coming into the holiday season. I even thought about going back to the old department, but they don't really need any help over there, either. Oh, well.

Today I called and asked if I could just come in later. I got so much done this morning. I made a pot of soup, made a big dent in the THW Golf poster I was making for Marcus, shoveled the front steps, washed some dishes...all before noon. I got in about 12:30 and knew the rest of the day was going to suck when I saw that they had my office mate working at one of the inkjetters. After I checked my email and saw there was nothing to do, I clocked out on a break and went back to working on Marcus' poster. It was another hour before there was anything to do and that was because someone else in my department went home for the day. I worked a whole two jobs, prepared a third so that I could tackle it in the morning when the client sends the data and then I had to clock out. Five freaking hours was all I managed to eek out. Oh, well. Of course, I got home early and then Marcus got stuck at work and I had to eat my soup all by myself. At least I had his poster done by the time I got home.

So, how did the poster turn out? Not too shabby:

I got stuck at work an extra hour and a half tonight because of a stupid 12 page PDF high school newspaper file generated with Microsoft Publisher that would not go through our RIP.

It kept crashing Acrobat when I tried splitting pages out individually.

It was supposed to be black only, but everything color RGB (not CMYK).

It was poorly designed to begin with.

I was ready to scream.

Fortunately, one of my co-workers had a workaround.

It was one in a long line of jobs today that had me pulling my hair out.

I worked on a college publication that sounded like it had been written by high school students.

I literally banged my head on the desk while reading that one.

I always wondered before I got into the industry why prepress people and graphic designers* hated each other.

Now I know. Boy, do I know.

*I'm using the term designer loosely. Most of the crap we see every day is done by some yahoo who thinks just because he/she can work a computer, he/she is a designer. It's why I can't find work as a designer that pays anything.

I saw some tweets last week about the Google Pac-Man game they had on their homepage to honor the 30th anniversary of the game. Many people were lamenting how much time they had wasted playing it. Fortunately for our company, our department is not allowed to use the Internet during the work day for non-work activities (we have to log in to a firewall to get to the Internet and those logs are reviewed frequently). Other companies were not so lucky. Apparently, more then 4.8 million work hours were wasted by people playing the game.