I’ve been uninspired to post today. On a whim, I had asked my designer to come into the office yesterday instead of today, and I must thank my humble spirit guides for directing me to do so, because our advertisements were a disaster. They’re usually a mess in general, but this month, half the documents were corrupted and the other half were created on a system more advanced than mine, so I couldn’t even get them open. In the wee hours of this morning, he got the fuckers to work and to read right, and I got the document back today to do last-minute edits and to toss in some late-arriving graphics.
This, of course, would have been a breeze, but two ads weren’t even FedExed till today, so they had to be re-routed to the print shop. And then, of course, we have this ridiculous company that services our Macs, but all they do is fuck up my settings and cause setbacks. Whenever I give them a laundry list of my problems, they claim to fix them, but what they really do is go into my extensions folder and turn everything off. You know, because you really don’t need a font manager when you’re producing a 72-page Quark document. Morons.
So my designer literally sat with me on the phone for an hour and a half, because the moron from the Mac company decided to erase my Acrobat Distiller settings, so I couldn’t make a PDF of the document (we have to FTP each individual page as a PDF to the printer). Actually, what was fucked up was that I did make an initial PDF, but half of the color pages showed up as black-and-white. You know, because that’s so helpful when you’re working on a deadline.
I have helped to get the Mac service company fired, as of immediately and no later. In fact, I also put a bug in the right people’s ears to just hire my designer as our tech support person, because he knows his stuff and he doesn’t charge $500 for emergency phone calls in which Dawn becomes the helpless female who can’t use her technology. (Vibrators I can handle; Mac G4s with errors implanted by idiotic supposed profesionals are a little beyond my limits!)
Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick, why the hell is everything so difficult? My writer, designer and I have our processes down to a science, but invariably, the advertisements and the damage done by the “repairmen” cause two solid days of downtime. *scream* No wonder I get migraines!
There’s this old dude who has been calling me at work practically every day since last December. I have actually reached a point where I never even pick up the fucking phone anymore, because he’s calling three or four times a day to chat. And when I accidentally picked up yesterday (awaiting a call from my ad rep), he was on the line and got mad at me for not calling him back. I snapped that I was in the middle of a crisis (and I was), so I was indisposed. So he tried to ask me to call him that evening. He’s 83 and a darling chap, but for Christ’s sake, I am not the entertainment of the day. I wonder if this is what my grandfather does to people he calls at companies when he needs customer service. Mom reports that he’s on the phone forever sometimes; I always feel bad for the guy who calls me and try to hang in there and be interested and attentive. But this just wasn’t one of those times. Hallelujah that I’m working off-site for the next two workdays — my voice mail log is about 86 percent full of calls from him ALONE!!!
Ahem.
Hung out at Shawn’s hacienda this evening while he cleaned and I threw together a cheese/meat plate for his holiday soiree tomorrow evening. ‘Twas the only time today that I managed to relax (that, and of course after my PDFs were made). Hurrah for the men in my life (except the old dude — somebody needs to put me out of my misery and remove my number from his speed dial!). But ain’t that the bitch of it all — young, hot, fuckable men are NEVER trying to hunt me down, but man, if they’re 83, they’re ALL over my voice mail!
I’m delirious. Speaking of putting me out of my misery, it’s time for NyQuil!!!