Such · a · pretty · girl · Happy · in · an · ugly · place

Halloween is a huge holiday for me, but November is notoriously busy because of people needing shit designed for the holidays, so I’m never really timely about posting about it. However, due to a Crape Myrtle tree’s roots growing into our plumbing system and the subsequent fix that is going to require a wall being torn out and the water to be cut off all day, I’m working at home and have time to post about it now!

We had our work dress up day the Thursday before Halloween because one of the designers had a wedding to go to and wouldn’t be there Friday. Just for the record, I think that it’s a terrible idea to have a wedding on Halloween weekend if you think Halloween is stupid and don’t want people to dress up. Way to ruin someone’s holiday.

We usually have themed dress up days, and this year’s theme was dysfunctional prom. It was going to be “white trash prom” and then “ghetto prom”, but we eventually opted for the broader theme of generically dysfunctional to ease in costume selection. It still presented some issues for some of my coworkers. I was set because I had this gothic vinyl monstrosity of a senior prom dress that I can still fit into thanks to the fact that it’s a corset. This was the easiest dress up day ever for me.

My adjacent coworker, who is now going to be referred to as my work boyfriend (which is a long story that I will be broaching on a later date), decided on Tuesday that he wanted to wear a dress. After a couple of ill-fated trips to Goodwill, I talked him into going to my favorite thrift store up in Roswell. While he was trying on a tux in a last-ditch effort to have a costume, I found the perfect lilac dress for him and it actually fit!

We decided that since it was a prom theme, that we’d take prom pictures with a cheesy background. We actually posted all of these on a site and sent them to vendors. I’m only going to repost the couple’s pictures, because they’re the best ones. We happened to have this marble column laying around the office. The fruit and flower arrangement was a gift to the office manager from her MIL, that was rejected and given away during our annual white elephant Christmas gift exchange and has somehow made it onto my work boyfriend’s desk.

crossposted from fuzzdecay.com.

The office moved last week. We’ve gone from a dark little cave to a bright, echo-y hall of douchebaggery. I never thought I would miss working in the cave that completely blocked all means of cellular communication.

I am one of three designers that did not get an office. This is still a step up for me, though, because I was previously at the tiniest desk in the office. I now have a big-girl desk that I haven’t quite gotten used to. All of my stuff is still crammed into a tiny corner, and I lose job jackets because the account execs drop them wherever on my desk and I keep forgetting that it’s all my desk.

My desk is right outside of pervy coworker’s office. He’s taken to listening to terrible, whiny 90s radio rock on his shitty internal speakers. I guess he thinks because  he has an office that it’s cool to play music with the door open and leave it going as wanders aroung. My adjacent coworker finally had enough and stayed late to tear pervy coworker’s computer apart in an effort to silence the speaker.

The acoustics in the office are terrible. We have a nice high ceiling, which makes for insane echo. There’s no place to go in the office and talk without everyone else hearing it. One of the owner’s major complaints about the old office was how sound carried, and it’s at least 50 times worse in the new office.

On our last day at the old office, pregnant coworker was on one of her plentiful conference calls via speaker phone. The owner walked by and muttered, “I can’t wait until I don’t have to hear that shit anymore and I can just tell her to shut the goddamned door.” I’m pretty much convinced that the reason all the account execs got offices with doors in because the owner was tired of hearing everyone’s conference calls.

The first day in the new office, pregnant coworker jumped on speakerphone. I walked up to the office manager’s desk (which is on the opposite end of the office) and said, “You’d think that she’d close her fucking door since she has one.” The office manager couldn’t believe that it was pregnant coworker’s phone because it was so loud. The office manager told me that she was going to go back there and make lots of noise until the door was shut. I left for lunch and when I got back, the office manager stopped me to tell me that the owner had gone over in the middle of the conference call and slammed her door. We had a hearty laugh.

Speaking of pregnant coworker, I found out recently that she threatened legal action if we didn’t provide her a breastfeeding room at the new office. Eventhough the vice president and the office manager pumped in their cars and bathrooms, she’s too good to do that. She actually said “I’m not going to sit on a toilet for hours while I pump.” Hours?? Really? It’s going to be great when she gets back from maternity leave (assuming she returns, I’m not 100% that she will), and does absolutely nothing because she’s too busy being an entitled cow.

crossposted from fuzzdecay.com.

This week at work was absolutely insane. We’re in the middle of a move from our current office space, which is a cave of a basement that cell signal can’t even puncture, to a new office that is being renovated. Last week there was a bit of a rain which made it evident, through an awesome amount of drywall damage, that the repair job on the roof of the new building hadn’t gone as well as was hoped.

So last week, the contractors spent time tearing out the water damaged drywall and replacing it with new. Before the roof contractors made it back out to fix the roof. A tarp was placed over the roof and the roofers were due out this Monday along with the HVAC people.

Over the weekend, we were pummeled with a storm riding a front that hovered over atl all weekend. Cue Monday and it’s still raining. The roofers refuse to come out and the HVAC people are there, but can’t hoist the unit to the roof because the ground is too soft and the crane is sinking.

At around 2pm, someone from the upstairs of our current building comes down and says “The ditch is in danger of overflowing, you might want to move your cars”. This is completely preposterous in my mind, as there is a 5ft bank for the 3″ deep creek to flow through and a 5ft wall on top of that to protect our parking area.

At 3pm the lights go out. They stay off for around 15 minutes, which means they’re most likely not coming back on before the close of business, so everyone goes around shutting off the surge protectors to stop the beeping until we’re told to leave. One of my coworkers grabs me and tells me to go upstairs because the creek is spewing forth like whitewater from underneath the road.

Then I am reminded of what the lady from upstairs was telling us about the parking lot flooded and we all ran outside and are greeted with this:

That concrete barrier is the wall I was alluding to earlier. The water is even with the land that the concrete wall originates from.Although the parking lot was in no danger of flooding, it was in danger of having the ornamental trees in it toppling over from massive erosion. Everyone started moving their cars and we went back inside.

Upon returning to the building, our Vice President was freaking out because the contractor working on the new building had just called and said that “thousands of gallons of water” were pouring into the new building through its leaky roof. After trying to call a flood cleanup company and not being able to get through to any of them, she ran out of the office and told us to finish up what we could and try to make it safely home.

I live 12 miles from work. It took me an hour and a half to go home.

I was told that 400 was a parking lot and to try to take back roads home. My usual back road was blocked by a tree. I spent about 30 mins taking the alternate back road home and made it halfway before seeing an even bigger tree blocking this road, causing me to have to backtrack and try 400 afterall.

400 wasn’t backed up too badly until I saw the traffic sign saying that 75/85 was closed due to flooding. At that point, I didn’t think it’d be that big of a deal because the sign said that the interstate was closed at downtown and I only needed to be on it until midtown. I was a smidge mistaken.

It finally stopped raining some time during the evening, so I went into work the next day and saw the devastation of the creek overflowing.

In the background, you can see where the water pulled a chain link fence to the ground. That’s insane, because the current wasn’t even that strong that far down.

It was a pretty interesting distraction from business as usual. I can’t believe that Atlanta is so ill-prepared for flooding. I-20 was closed for multiple days and Six Flags is still under water. It just started raining again today and we’re under a flood watch again, so who knows what’s going to happen now?

crossposted from fuzzdecay.com.

I’ve wasted the last almost week of my life in bed thanks to the plague I’ve somehow acquired. My doctor suspects it to be swine flu (yeah, seriously. lucky me?), but I haven’t made it in for testing. I don’t know if I will bother now because I’m feeling marginally better. I have no idea how I could have possibly caught it. No one I’ve been around lately has had anything even remotely resembling this mucus-filled nightmare.

I’m now ridiculously behind on the freelance work I’m working on. I’m juggling about 7 different jobs from 3 different clients right now. Most of it is print based, so pretty quick work, but one is an entire website design which is proving to be more time consuming than I though. On top of this, I am about to pick up an additional web job from an incompetent local web design company that have completely screwed over one of my repeat clients. I was planning on knocking out all of the print work for the client that’s giving me the additional web job this past week, and fleshing out the rest of the first web job as much as possible (i’m still missing… oh… all of the content for that, ugh.) so I’d be a bit less stressed. But yeah, that didn’t happen.

I was also hoping to split some of the wedding freelance work I’m doing with my future business partner so that we could start acting like a business, and she’s, of course, too busy to take anything. I’m starting to get really concerned about the feasibility of getting this business off the ground. I know that she means well and is serious about the business, but is busy with her ridiculous work schedule. It’s just worrisome that we’ve made no real progress since June on getting our shit together. Part of that is my fault, because I’m also ridiculously busy, but I feel like it’s mostly me working around her schedule when we are equally strapped for time.

I’m sure it will all work out in the end, I’m just having a bit of a breakdown right now. I feel like I have entirely too much responsibility that I can’t successfully delegate out, and I really need to be able to.

Deep breath.

If anyone says something positive about me, it’s that I’m driven. My mom’s favorite way of saying this is to never tell me that I can’t do something, unless you want to be proven wrong. I know that I can get through this, no matter how behind this stupid plague has put me. I’ll start on catching up when it doesn’t feel like I have a bucket of nails hanging out in my brains : (

crossposted from fuzzdecay.com.

I started working on xmas themed ads in August. Ugh.

We have a client that has a large “worship” market, that they believe is only christian although that is not the case. They always want to really jesus-up the mailers and ads they do, eventhough a pretty large chunk of their mailing list are synagogues. So instead of fighting it this year, I just decided to search “christmas jesus”.

The search yielded this beauty, which I am compelled to work into a mailer now. It’s too tongue-in-cheek to just let it slide. If i’m going to be forced into pandering to the evangelicals, I might as well have fun with it.

I’ve also found out recently that:

my pervert coworker wears girls’ jeans. Not that this surprises me in the least because he’s in his 40s and dresses like he aspires to grace the pages of latfh.

and my pregnant coworker got bit in the ass for looking at daycare centers when she was in her first trimester instead of pediatricians, like a sane person would do. She was on the phone with her preferred pediatrician for most of an afternoon trying to bully herself into a spot. An argument which she eventually lost.

I am now guiding my office into the wonderful world that is social media advertising. I pointed them toward the (canadian) Nissan Hypercube fiasco as a cautionary tale. I actually would like to delve into this marketing disaster in-depth, but it’s been done many, many times over now. Suffice it to say, I’m glad that my company is utilizing me as a user of said social media to guide our efforts, instead of some marketing douchebag that really doesn’t know anything abut the medium.

I’m hoping that my company will realize that I’m more than an inDesign and Flash jockey. Not that I want to get into marketing in the slightest, but I feel as though I’m being woefully underutilized.

crossposted from fuzzdecay.com.

I have been silent lately. Not for a lack of things to say, but because it took a full 40 hours for the data to transfer between my old macbook and my new one. It is painful for me to be without a computer for that long, especially while in the middle of freelance work. Luckily, my clients seemed to be pretty understanding. But that just means I have to work twice as hard now to pick up the slack.

New macbook is nice but it isn’t. It’s much faster, has much more storage capacity, the optical drive is on the side where it should be, and the screen will get a lot brighter and dimmer than my old one. However, I hate the keyboard. It’s loud, it’s ugly, it’s not as ergonomic, and the volume up/down keys aren’t in the proper spot. I keep opening dashboard or exposéing instead of muting or turning the volume down. I wish there were some way to put the keyboard from my old macbook into my new one.

An additional complaint is that it’s fucking retarded to send out a computer that has a firewire800 port without including a 400-800 adapter when the primary means of transferring data between computers during setup is firewire. I had to transfer over the network, which is why it took ages.

Aside from the time lost, it was a pretty painless process. I opened up the new macbook and it felt like being on the old one. All my icons were in the right place, my firefox tabs were saved, and even the files in my trash bin were moved over. My only lingering issue is that some of my fonts apparently didn’t transfer over properly, but I haven’t had time to properly look into why that happened.

crossposted from fuzzdecay.com.