Third Monday

03-10-08

I got to work before nine. The guy wasn't there. He showed up late and the woman did not arrive until well in the afternoon.

That would be ok but when I got there, my internet was working. This was bad.

When he got there his solution was to just kept trying, it would work eventually. I told him the phone line was dead- I could try all I wanted but it wasn't going to work. We swapped his phone for the internet phone to make sure maybe just the receiver wasn't dead. When I went to his side of the office, the smell was so obnoxious I had to run outside and get some fresh air as I almost puked. The phone jack in my office area was buried under piles and piles of old newspapers. That has to be a fire hazard. It turned out to be the jack and not the phone. The guy called the phone company the same one that has jerked him around for three weeks on installing a dsl line. It was promised the week before I was hired and even though they still haven't fulfilled the order, they don't go to a company that I have heard of before. It is obvious they jack will not be fixed, so I brainstorm. I decide to plug my computer into the fax line so I can have the internet. But the guy protests and says but we won't have faxes. I said that is a shame but no internet means no paper.

Hours late when she arrives, she is incensed to discover she has no fax machine. She screams we aren't getting a dsl line because we need a fax machine more. (Of course that makes no sense) Every hour or so she yells about the fax machine, it is like she can't comprehend that without the internet I can't produce a newspaper.

She is also focused on the one ad that did not look good last week. Five times I have told her that the fault was the people who made the ad. The printer people have said so over and over. I have sent the ad to the them and they have cleaned it up. Yet she refuses to give me any other ads until the company sends a new ad (the same one we have) to the printer so they can clean it up and look at it (which they have already done) and then resend it back to me so I can resend it to back to them on a page. If I don't do this then there will be no paper. Insanity. Ultimate insanity.
Around two I ask the guy how many coaches called him back, I had him call five hoping to get two or three. He tells me none. I am flabbergasted. You were going to tell me this when?

Never fear for filling the hole though, she tells me at 2pm on Monday- she wants a full page ad that is a coloring contest. Here is the problem-- they have no indesign copies of it. They have old pdfs and they have old pagemaker files. If you open the pagemaker in indesign it doesn't work- its all garbled. You can make changes for new dates in pagemaker but it won't make a pdf because the distiller is missing. I spend three hours calling people about this. Finally I open a pdf in photoshop make it a tif and place it as an image then I cover up the dates. Of course all the ads are two years old and she hasn't sold any new ones but she has me leave them in. Oh and the cost gives cash prizes to little kids for coloring. She won't pay me a decent wage and worse tells me no more $10 intern stories but little kids get cash money for coloring. Oh we have enough content now she says. Because I am working my butt off and she can't pony up ten bucks so I can get one real story written by a good writer to help me out.

She has the worst phone voice well except for the guy maybe. She can barely make conversation on the phone and confuses whoever she calls. You can't understand anything he says.

It is hard to describe them. Imagine if the stapler guy from Office Space was an orthodox jew, that would be him. The voice is nearly the same. I am sure at one time she was good at what she did and that is all she remembers. She doesn't notice what her paper is now and she is clueless at how it is now perceived. I went to a mayor's office today and someone told me if she calls the mayor and he doesn't call back in ten minutes, she gets very abusive with whoever she is on the phone with.

At any rate, at 6pm I get my ad list and I still have no stories from the guy. During the day alone- while I solved all these crisises-- I wrote four stories all with real quotes from real people. One story with two mayors and a service department head. And he has nothing.

I go home 11 hours after I got there.