Gotta Find a Second Job
So at first my new job was pretty sweet. I got to sit at a computer all day and play around in Indesign and Photoshop, listen to my iPod, and ignore everybody. I knew it was a part-time gig when I started, but four eight-hour days a week still added up to a decent paycheck. When I first started I remember thinking “Wow, how do they get all these ads built in just 4 days?” I found out later it was because they had no workflow and their network sucked. Unfortunately for my hours, I decided to fix all these problems to make my job easier for myself.
First off, all links to images in all our Indesign documents were linked with relative links, rather than absolute links. For example, if a designer inserted an image into a document from C:\Images\clipart.tif, if that document was moved to another computer in the office, obviously C:\Images\clipart.tif most likely wouldn’t exist on that computer, so every image would have to be relinked in order for that person to work on it. When the document returned to its original creator, he would have to relink all the images AGAIN in order to PDF it. This was a much larger problem when it came to inserting all the PDFs of the individual ads into our full-page PDFs. If it had to transfer to another computer, that person was forced to relink EVERY ad on the page before he could continue. This needless re-linking cost them several hours a week of productivity. I finally collected all graphics onto a central computer and mapped identical network drives on all of our systems to all the resources that we need to get into. NOW, everybody’s images are in network drive X:, and documents can be moved from computer to computer without incident. They’ve been doing this for over a year now and nobody ever thought to fix the problem. It took me a bored Friday afternoon to fix all our horrible network problems (they had printer issues too). Immediately I had more web browsing time at work.
Secondly, whoever I replaced didn’t really know what they were doing. I’ve streamlined all of our most annoying ads (car ads) with one of the most basic desktop publishing concepts: tabs. Local car dealers like to think that an effective advertisement lists every car you have on your lot, so I spent a lot of time each week manually typing in giant lists of used cars, their prices, and brief descriptions of them. NOW, all our ads with complex text have carefully constructed tab assignments that make putting NEW text into them a simple, rather than frustrating, procedure. Again, my web browsing time must have doubled.
Since I started there I’ve been doing a lot of little things like this in order to simplify my job. When I started, I was there at 8:30am every morning, dealing with all our little network and workflow problems. As I took care of more and more of them, I started coming in later and later. Now I saunter in a sometime between 10:30 and 11:00, sit down and build all the ads I have in my inbox, take a long lunch, come back and finish anything new that has found its way into my inbox, and go home.
I do this twice a week now.
I’ve almost completely streamlined myself out of a job. Each day I perform about four hours of “actual” work, then browse the web or read skate magazines until I either get sick of being paid to read and I excuse myself, or they realize they’re paying me to read and excuse me. It’s unfortunate because I actually enjoy my job a great deal, and could tolerate doing it full-time; the need just isn’t there anymore. I’ve been digging around in the paper a bit for an additional job, but so far nothing has come up. I guess I’ll see what happens.
Hey, while we’re at it, here’s a quick gameplay tip from chess veterans Chuck and Cameron.
March 6th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
That is a rare form of “en passante” I believe.