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innerspaceboy · 04-17-2017, 10:52 AM

Like most small businesses, it is critical that each employee wear many hats to keep the place running. To date, I’ve served as a customer service rep, a prepress designer, technical support ranging from network troubleshooting to building new towers for the office, app development and publishing, developed solutions for paperless workflow automation, social media manager, marketing, commercial video design and voiceover work, blogger (researching and drafting content and publishing it to various networks), and website maintenance. But over the last few years, the majority of these responsibilities have dried up as we have no customers, so I’ve now been demoted to operating the presses and to bindery work like assembling hundreds of folders or stuffing thousands of envelopes.

And in the interest of saving money in the short-term, our CEO decisively abstains from investing in affordable, industry-standard equipment, opting instead for soul-crushing manual labor. So while any other professional print production facility would be expected to have a device called a finisher to rapidly and consistently fold and staple packets and booklets, I have the rare fortune of being told to perform this monotonous task by hand for hours and hours at a time. Just this afternoon (and for the last several days), I’ve been charged with the task of hand-collating and hand stapling 1,725 packets of paper. (Once again - that college degree really shines in this environment.)

Originally, our CEO had the brilliant idea of hiring our janitor to do the bindery work. But lately, he’s decided that he can save even more by having me do it in place of the janitor. And his sharp-minded cost-saving strategies don’t stop there. He’s instructed me to leave off lights in the building which we don’t really need, and he kicked me out of my office to lease the room out to an elderly couple for extra income. The downside of this is that I now have a desk in the middle of a giant print production floor, where I am bombarded by the whirring, buzzing, and CLACK-CLACK-CLACKing of hydraulic industrial cutters and folders all day long while I try to work.

But it was his latest cost-saving notion which was the real treat - a 40-year-old laminating machine’s power supply failed while I was doing laminating work, melting the power cable and pouring black smoke from the machine. But instead of paying a repairman, he trimmed a spare power cord he found in the back of the shop and put me right back to work. (Unfortunately this posed an electrical hazard as the cable wasn't rated for the correct voltage, and the entire socket melted shortly thereafter.)

But do this so that I don’t have to pay the janitor.