Court, New Job
I can certainly see why some clever guy in broadcasting decided it would be very entertaining/profitable to make TV shows out of small claims court cases. I went into court today expecting it to be EXTREMELY boring, but was actually having trouble keeping myself from laughing during a nearly 2-hour, live action, white trash soap opera. I think that in order to become a judge, during the interview process, they must describe the most outrageous, petty crimes imaginable and see how good you are at keeping a poker face. It was almost entirely older, visibly low-income people being forced to stand in front of a room full of people while the judge reads off hilarious combinations of misdemeanors.
“Jim Bradley, do you understand your charges of public intoxication, petty larceny, destruction of public property, and interfering with a police officer?”
Half the fun is trying to guess what possible sort of situation could result in a list of charges like this. If you could come up with a scoring system, you could make a game out of it, because the defendant is then asked to describe exactly what happened. I had to pull my knees up to my chest and bury my face to keep from interrupting the proceedings with hysterics.
My favorite explanation of the day had to do with a guy driving nearly two hours into town solely for the purpose of returning an overdue library book. I guess after he got the book INTO the building, he realized he was returning the book to the wrong library and tried to leave with it and the library’s alarms went off. He was also charged with DESTROYING the book, but he didn’t bother explaining how that happened. In his defense he claimed that if the book was stolen, the alarms would have gone off when he entered the building with it, effectively implying that the library was actually trying to FRAME him with the theft of this book. He must have destroyed it as an act of defiance once authorities arrived. Again, purely conjecture, he didn’t bother explaining a lot of what exactly happened. Trying to muffle my snorted laughter in my legs, tears silently streamed down my face.
Anyway, the lady that told me which courtroom to go into gave really bad directions and I actually sat through the wrong session. For an hour and a half! Once I figured out what was going on, I managed to find the CORRECT court room and it only took about 5 minutes to plead guilty to falling into a trap. Surprisingly, although EVERYBODY I talked to claimed my ticket was going to cost between $650 and $750, I paid $200 and a $30 court fee. I was extremely relieved. Well, it’s still bullshit, but bullshit that costs me less than $300 is tolerable.
To help pay this ticket, I have also already found myself a new job, which I started on Tuesday. The official title is “graphic designer”, but that makes it sound like I conceive ads for Absolut vodka or something. Nono, this is for a small local want ads paper. My “designing” is mostly limited to browsing through our enormous clipart archive, finding the least tacky examples I can find, and sticking them in with a bunch of text in a box. Unlike my short-lived graphic design position at the PAPER paper, this dinky little want ads paper actually uses superior software (all Adobe products), so I’m much more comfortable.
Really the only challenging part of the job is trying to balance filling ad requests from philistines to their satisfaction while trying to maintain some semblance of artistic integrity. Small businesses like to think that a 2×2″ advertisement has to list every single item they have for sale, or every single service they provide. If they purchase a color ad, they don’t want clever, conservative use of color, they want every single element of the ad to be a different, clashing color. Ads where I have complete creative control are still fun.
They love my work, and I’ve basically been charged with the task of slowly “fixing” or replacing entirely, rerun ads that businesses buy every week. Many of these have been unchanged for weeks or months, and are just awful. I’ve become responsible for removing and replacing aliased, low-resolution graphics, and have already rebuilt several photos we use all the time. Why do I care so much? I’m not really sure. A guy browsing this paper looking for a lawnmower isn’t worried about pixelated graphics, but as long as I’m working there, I guess I should try to take a little pride in what I do.
It’s really not that bad. I show up, sit at a computer, put my headphones on, shut everybody out, and spend 8 hours typing text and playing in InDesign. I am unsupervised, I take my lunch when I want it, and I don’t have to ask frat boys “bottles or cans?” any more. Oh, this is as good a place as any to mention that it pays less than the liquor store (well, if I count tips…which were actually the majority of my income at the liquor store). Eh. It pays the bills til I can find something better, I guess.
