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innerspaceboy · 06-05-2017, 11:08 AM

Ever the capitalist, our CEO is always looking for opportunities to save a buck by piling more and more work onto his existing staff so that he doesn’t have to pay anyone else.

Originally hired as a CSR, the workload diminished considerably over time, and after our prepress designer quit in fit of frustration at our boss’ ignorance, the baton was passed on to me. It didn’t matter that I’d left college years before InDesign became the industry standard application and that I had no training to work as a prepress designer, I was told to just “figure it out.”

So I did, and excelled at it despite all of our CEO’s efforts to set me up for failure. As the weeks passed, other job titles were added to my name, including app developer, app publisher, designer of paperless workflow automation solutions, marketing content developer, video producer with accompanying voiceover work, marketing strategist, print workflow manager, social media marketing manager for his and several other companies, printer, bindery lacky, and janitor. Of course, no compensation was offered for these additional roles, so I continued to kick along just skirting minimum wage.

One of my self-confessed caveats in performing these roles untrained is that my linear mind requires that I take careful notes of each process which I then type up and catalog as reference material for future employees. Over the past 3 years, I’ve developed over one hundred training guides and manuals, complete with visual step-by-step guides so that complex tasks can be performed reliably and with great accuracy.

Unfortunately, our CEO sees no value in this, and communicated that he expects that I be shown someone’s job once and just remember it all. This includes all the countless exceptions to every standard print configuration in the case of print operations, where one particular paper type uses a gamut of different settings depending on simplex vs. duplex printing, ink coverage, stock weight, etc. Hence the need for my well-organized notes.

Today my boss saw me with notes in hand after he instructed me to operate the printers for him. He walked up, snatched my process guide from my hands, held it conspicuously over the trash, waited until he had my full eye-contact and attention, and dropped all my notes into the trash.

He said, “figure it out” and walked away.

I love my job.