Reflections on the Real World, Continued

You may think that I’ve just been lazy and unmotivated to finish writing about my exciting adventures in the real world, but you would be only partially correct. I’ve avoided writing about my last job because I still feel so burnt out from it, not to mention that I’ve been complaining about it on my forum (and occasionally on my blog) for the last four or five months. But the time for procrastination is over.

Job 3

Job 3 came at me pretty much out of the blue shortly after Brinestone quit work to have Lego. In case you missed that story, you can read it here. It sounded pretty good when I took it, but I found out pretty quickly that it wasn’t quite what I expected. They wanted someone with two years of experience editing and laying out documents. I didn’t exactly have that much experience doing layout—more like one year of work experience plus a print publishing course in college—but they didn’t seem to care (or maybe they didn’t realize).

I discovered pretty quickly that there was virtually no editing involved. In fact, there was scarcely any real layout work, either. Most of my job consisted of making minor changes to existing documents, mostly forms. This doesn’t sound so bad, but when people make minor changes about once a month and take several rounds back and forth with me to make them all, it gets a little annoying.

Another thing I soon discovered was that all the documents at this company had apparently been laid out by someone with no experience doing layout. Every single document I worked on was designed and laid out in such a way that it took two or three times longer than normal to make any changes to them. Style sheets and master pages were used haphazardly and inconsistently. Text was positioned using spaces and hard returns. Text columns were broken up around graphics instead of using runaround or anchoring the graphics into the text. In one particularly bewildering example, borders were “added” to graphics by drawing a second graphics frame over the top of each one and putting a border on the superfluous frame.

This wouldn’t have been so bad if not for the fact that I never had time to fix most of the problems. Virtually every project I received was a rush project, so I had to work around the problems or make minimal improvements before sending it out the door. When every project is a rush and every change takes extra time to make, things become unnecessarily stressful.

And “unnecessarily stressful” takes me to my next topic, my boss. You’d think that the person in charge of print production would have some sort of experience in the publishing industry. Instead, my boss had a degree in business finance. Her title was director of operations. That’s right—she was supposedly in charge of money-related things, yet somehow she had layout artists working for her. And she knew precisely as much about desktop publishing as you’d imagine—that is, absolutely nothing. She could hardly even keep track of which programs we used.

In fact, she was not much unlike the Pointy-Haired Boss from Dilbert in terms of computer ineptitude, lack of understanding of my job, and general sociopathic tendencies. She really deserves an entire post dedicated to her, and since this one is already getting a long, I’ll wrap things up here. Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion, when I explore the baffling and frustrating nature of the psycho boss who drove me to quit.

This entry was posted by Jonathon in Work on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006, at 9:40 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed . You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.