| StoreTags: downlording, WORK SUX
Author: mechp on September 07 2007 Viewed 2221 times. 17 people liked this blog. You can rate it below if you haven't already.
People who enjoyed reading this: mixedtape, airliner, Zanf, lilt, electrodan, Roshi, bodo, Fredo, jogn, sAMsKi, RRine, fakeBlooper, energygiant, quicks, implexgrace, bla, mlbot
-->
Not sure how many of you graphic designers out there have ever taken a "design" job that is less design and really just formatting text.... well I have the distinct pleasure of cleaning up a 300+ page curriculum that some idiotic sub-contractor fuckwad messed up big time.
Not only do I get to deal with the former formatter's idiocy, but I get to wade through pages and pages of printed out material with my supervisor's scrawl all over it with informative little notes like "Make this look like the previous ones." WTF!!?!?
[A little more detail for those of you that know InDesign]
This dude that mutilated this before me made all kinds of elementary mistakes such as... on roughly 100 pages he put white boxes over a part of his master page design and them put the special graphics for the page over that, which all shifted in the porting process (he uses an old version of In Design) exposing little bits of visual garbage on the edges of all the pages! If he had taken 3 minutes to look at the help file, he'd have found that by simply hold crtl+shift he could delete unwanted master page elements instead of making my life a living hell!! That's just the tip of this man's idiot ice-berg! AHHH
I'm still at work ON A FRIDAY because of this bullshit.
Thanks for listening whilst I vented. If you have client/boss/idiot co-worker horror stories, I'd love to hear them. Catharsis time people!
p.s. I've attached a pic of a bionic sphincter, apparently they are very popular in Japan. | |
Comments
09/07/07
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
mixedtape
omfg yes. hate that.
I also hate when developing a site (I usually turn in the site with their finalized copy, or most of it at least, already in place) I end up becoming editor. I once had a job that never seemed to end. "Please change "1" to "one" in page 3 and "they're" to "they are" on page 7.", etc, etc. I literally had at least 5 rounds of TEXTUAL edits! At least that job was hourly, which was the only reason I didn't say fuck no.
09/07/07
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
ejectorset
OMGAW he tried to " white-out ™ " master page elements manually?
i feel you. i have too many horror stories to even get into it, from when we used to office with this total moran. like seriously this guy took the time to fax somebody about typos they had made and it had MOR spelling ERRARS and GRMMAR problems than every reply ever made on em411 combined. he typed it up in word which seems to me like it has a little tool called spellcheck built in and turned on by default.
09/08/07
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
timmo
Holy crap that sounds like it sucks.
Not design related, but I recently did a no-pay shoot for some "film school" student. Long story long, he had me shooting people dressed in black robes with black masks in total darkness:
Him: How's it look?
Me: Totally black.
Him: Let me get my flashlight...
[later]
Him: How's it look now?
Me: Still totally black.
Him: That's OK, I'll fix it in post.
Me: Sure you will...
Him: Really, I'm an expert at filters.
Me: OK! You can leave me off the credits if you want.
None of my production friends ever believe my stories! And I didn't get paid.
Oh yeah, same movie different day, sex scene, the actress brings her little brother along because he wants to see how a movie is made. Not only was it a bad example of movie making but he waited down in the lobby anyway. Who wants to see your overweight sister pretending to do it with some creepy old guy? Am I allowed to say jdg? Cuz he seems like he would be all over that.
09/08/07
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
jdg
there was this one guy, his name was sean.
he would get to work at 4:30a... and he would call me up.
"john, i can't print"
"uh.. wtf.. 4.30a"
"i have an important meating at 6a with NY"
"have u rebooted?"
"i can't print"
"sean.... im 40min away, can you try to fix it yourself"
"can't.... print"
09/08/07
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
bodo
I get this crap all the time, working at a printing house didn't really improve my hopes for mankined.
Usually it's the bigger over-paid ad agencies that turn in the biggest pile of poo. And some clients refuse to send me the master document, so have to do all the corrections in Acrobat with PitStop, which can be a real pain. People tend to get the basics all wrong, RGB export, no bleed, corrupt fonts, etc. And of course this usually happens on a friday night 
09/08/07
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
Fredo
I feel for allayall. Bigtime. So funny in retrospect but so painful in person. I once had probably the sickest job you could possibly imagine: i was give two enourmous, fat books, like 2000 page books, each doublesided page filled with 3 columns of dollar amount figures. Then I was given a somewhat skinnier book (maybe only 700 pages) with the same. My job was to see if I could find each of those dollar amounts from the skinny book in one of the two fat books. I kid you not. It was an absolute nightmare.
09/08/07
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
hageir
the biggest thing I've "reformatted" was an instructions manual for a anti-psychotic drug
while being really annoying (set up in a freehand document older than fire and manually kerned or something)
it was amazingly funny, the side-effects on that drug were crazy; "uncontrollable erections, paralyzing headaches, "evilness" and a ton more"
just listen to some "american intelligent dance music" while you're at it (next time) heh
09/08/07
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
jogn
that's like where's wally but worse.
there was one time i had to add functionality to an ecommerce thingy that went through 3 previous coders, the original of which was coughed up from scratch in a week. I refactored everything and deleted all possible white/tab spaces. I figured it was appropriate payback.
09/08/07
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
sAMsKi
urghhhhhhh. i feel your pain. 
09/08/07
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
fakeBlooper
i feel your pain. in a past life i did catalogs, automotive adverts, technical manuals, etc.... if you have the right tools it's not so bad. by FAR the best layout app for text heavy jobs is multi-ad creator. every little nudge in kerning, leading, size, font, tab management is tied to a logical and ergonomic hot key combination. it also has a format copy+paste so you can get one little module formatted right then copy and paste the formatting onto all other like butter. other apps have similar things like style palettes but the way its implemented in creator is awesome (apple + G, apple + D... that's it). the lite version is $99 and it pays for itself in the time it saves on your first job. the only thing it can't do is separations but your print house should be able to do that from the pdf it exports natively. its the sleeper layout app that pros use.
09/08/07
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
fakeBlooper
oh yeah there's a plugin for working with and exporting quark and indesign docs. if you're handy with applescript you can automate things like laying out 100 used cars with their formated text liners underneath them. no i don't work for them
09/08/07
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
implexgrace
wow sounds kinda like my job, except i have to go back and A) fix bad HTML code and then B) convert sites that are 50+ pages into PHP. oof.
tedious work like this sucks ass and you might almost be better of redesigning the whole damn thing.
09/09/07
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
joerex
can't you apple script that stuff!
09/09/07
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
mechp
fakeBlooper- thanks for the tip on the software, I hadn't heard of it before.
It's sunday, I'm at work, 'nuff said.
p.s.all your guys' stories are funny and heartening, thanks!
09/09/07
+
PM |
QUOTE |
PERMALINK |
REPORT
fakeBlooper
the worst is when you're handed a folder full of hand scribbled catalog liners or autos and you're expected to format them in price order. of course the price is the last thing they want listed per liner... tab delimited text files + excel can be your best friend for sorting stuff like that. managing the pic that goes with which liner then becomes a nightmare so i usually got the typist to tab her part correctly and add an "original sort id", sort through excel, then add another auto-incrementing "new sort id" column, then photoshop action automate the pics off the photographer's memory stick for the resize, color correction right into the root project folder, then match up the numbered pics with the original sort id. stuff like that can turn a 3 day job around before lunch... unless you charge by the hour
Register / login
|
^
EM411 is Copyright 2001-2008 EM411.com
All rights reserved. | Contact | RSS
|
