innerspaceboy

Note: Remember friends - this is all in the past.

Today a customer brought in a stretched canvas measuring 24” x 36” and asked my boss for 12” x 18” digital prints. Being completely oblivious to the world of design, my boss said, “sure” and charged the pastor $12. (Once again, all of our clients are members of the church as my employer only associates with people of faith.) I was then handed the large canvas and told to “make it happen” and that I had 30 minutes.

My initial reply was to request a Nikon D5600 (or similar digital SLR) with a standard lens, three tripod spotlights with full-spectrum UV photography bulbs, and a stage. This thoroughly confused my employer as he didn’t know what any of those words meant. “I don’t have any of that,” he replied. “Well how then am I to produce the digital image?” I asked, wincing in anticipation of his response. He gestured lazily to a photocopier in the corner of the shop and said, “just scan it.”

Dark clouds quickly moved in and blocked out the sun. Crows began cawing angrily at the impending doom fast approaching my workplace. I sighed, and began to explain, in as simple language as I could for my boss just a few of the problems with his solution. I mentioned that the photocopier has a non-removable lid, and that the left side of the scanning area had a large, raised lip so the canvas would not actually lay flush with the scanning surface. This would result in large shadows, distortion from angled scans, and color shifting. Also, the maximum scan area is just over 8.5” x 11” so I would be required to digitally stitch a stockpile of partial scans, none of which would line up or be in any way color consistent. I explained that oil paint brush strokes take time to register when digitally stitched. And perhaps worst of all, the lid on the scanner prevented me from capturing any of the center area of the large painting, so I would have to digitally draw in a 16” x 6” area missing from the scans. But my boss would have none of these silly limitations of reality, and I was again told I had thirty minutes to complete the $12 order.

What I didn’t share with my boss was that I worked for years for the region’s largest photo production company, specializing in antique photo restoration. I would normally charge the industry standard of $60-$90 an hour to digitally reproduce a large format portrait or painting, but thanks to capitalism, my boss can simply add this job to my ever-growing list of titles under his company and still pay me $14 an hour for my expertise. With no other option, I killed myself for 30 minutes, scanning, adjusting histograms, digitally registering partial scans, re-lighting seams, painting away all the heavy shadows, and repainting the large missing area of the Sistine Chapel which could not be scanned. I got it done, and he scoffed at me and said, “See? It wasn’t that hard.”

I’d rather give up the $14.

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innerspaceboy

Today my beloved CEO had yet another brilliant idea. He’d originally inherited his father’s printing company, but ever the intrepid entrepreneur, he decided that he was also an app developer and publisher, and later a social media marketing agency. But on this day he had an entirely new and equally inept business ploy - he now fancied himself a real world marketing firm. His staff would consist of one man - our favorite sexagenarian dolt who, this morning, forgot his bridge.

“You know that app company cell phone I gave you?” he asked confidently.

“You mean the one which hasn’t received a single call in three years? Why yes, yes I do,” I replied.

“I’ve got a great idea - since we’re not using it, let’s give it to [Dolt] to use for his marketing contacts!”

“Well,” I challenged him, “there is just one small problem with that. He doesn’t know how to use a cell phone, let alone the Google Voice number forwarding and messaging features I’ve set up for this device.”

“Well you can teach him!” he said excitedly.

And so, for the next two hours, I had to spoon feed our elderly friend the basics of cell phone use. At first, he dismissed my offer. “I have an Android phone already,” the Dolt explained proudly and held up his iPhone.

The next task was to transfer the Google Voice profile to the Dolt’s associated Google account. This proved difficult, as he had no idea what his Google login was. “I set this account up for you just over a month ago. Where did you write down your password?” I asked, (fully aware of his inevitable reply.) “I didn’t bother. I didn’t think I’d need it,” declared the Dolt.

But the true test of my humanity came when it was time for Dolt to record his voicemail greeting. He accomplished the task, after only thirty minutes of trial and error. Unable to locate the pound sign to accept his recorded greeting, he continued to terminate the call over and over and over again. His finished greeting was over a minute long - an insufferably slow instruction manual as to how to leave a message, with his assurance that he would return the call if he ever figured out how to check his phone. But in the end, after only two hours of struggle, the task was complete, and I bestowed upon him a device which he still has no idea how to use. Satisfied with his accomplishments, Dolt returned to his desk and resumed his favorite task - doodling marketing ideas with watermarked commercial thumbnail graphics in Powerpoint. (I hate this man.)

The day ended on a positive note, however. Our CEO was having difficulty with the Chrome Remote Desktop I’d installed for him. He too had no idea what his password was.

This marketing agency is going to take the world by storm.

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The Batlord

lulz

So do you make things needlessly complicated for your former coworkers simply for your own sadistic amusement? I certainly wouldn't be able to help myself.

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innerspaceboy

Needless complexity in an inherent property of anything I attempt to teach these Luddites. Their capacity for technological understanding is so limited, that even the most basic tasks become hour-long ordeals.

Outlook is painfully difficult for these people to navigate. And remembering passwords for anything is out of the question. Remember: This is the guy who struggles to operate a MOUSE and who worked for 30 minutes without success to get sound out of a training video before I informed him that he didn't have any speakers.

I am so over that sh*thole. But thanks for reading these entries. They do me a lot of good to get this crap out of my skull.

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The Batlord

Might I ask what the precipitating incident was for your former boss to decide that he wanted to expand from printing to apps and beyond in the first place? It doesn't exactly seem like the most logical leap.

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innerspaceboy

It's a brilliant story! My boss once attended a tradeshow and brought me along. One of the presentations was about "a revolutionary new technology which was going to take the print industry by storm and totally transform it!"

The company openly stated that the print industry is dying and that printers need a new source of income. They said they had the answer - a technology which takes digital copies of print material, adds the option for media-rich content, (audio and video objects), and encapsulate the glorified PDF into an ebook sort of environment, mobile friendly, with a dashboard of issues, in the form of an app you can download from the app stores.

It was their intent that printers offer digital versions of their print customer's work touting the potential for global distribution at no cost as a supplement to every print order.

The complete failure of this technology is evident at the outset. NO ONE is going to dedicate precious real estate on their cell phone for an app that only exists for your rinky-dink company's quarterly newsletter.

But my boss ate it right up and declared himself an "app developer."

Using their click-and-compile interface, we fed PDFs into their web-based application and it automatically submitted them to the Google Play and Apple App Stores as apps.

The trouble was, my boss didn't understand that you have to market an app for anyone to know it exists. He didn't, so for nearly three years, his apps sat in the stores with ZERO downloads.

And Apple even wrote us emails saying, "Guys? you're making us look bad. This isn't an app... it's a PDF. And you haven't updated it or created a new issue in over a year. Push some new content and features or we're pulling it from our stores."

So my boss let them get pulled. There are newer developments in his calling himself an "app developer" and a "marketing company", but I'll save those ridiculous tales for future entries to this journal.

What do you think?

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The Batlord

Please tell your old boss that I have recently acquired the deed to a bridge in Arizona that I believe would make him $50,000,000 if he just sends all of his life savings to my Nigerian bank account.

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innerspaceboy

I don't yet feel comfortable disclosing his latest get-rich-quick scheme, but I will say this - it involves him capitalizing on the new and emerging market of ...vaping.

I wish I could make up sh*t this insane.

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The Batlord

vaping...

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innerspaceboy

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.

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