Mild Rash...

I’m lacking perspective today. A work-related annoyance has been blown to full-scale “I can’t deal with humanity today. Why aren’t all the stupid people rounded up and summarily shot in the face?” Turns out, I become a bit of a fascist when I’m pissy. Oh, don’t get me wrong, my work annoyance is a genuinely annoying thing. If I may vent?

So, I’m rewriting all the brochures our little institution puts out. These are financially related applications/informational brochures. Not rocket science, not art, but I’m pretty pleased with how they are coming out. I’ve been working on this same brochure for more than 4 months now. Here’s what sucks, I can churn out one of these from scratch in a day, day and half. No problem. But, herein lies the problem: EVERY FUCKING ASSHAT WITH AN OPPOSABLE THUMB thinks they have approval/veto power over everything I put out.

So, I send this guy around for approval, one asshat looks at it, returns it to me asking me to rework the entire thing. Fine. Now, repeat this no fewer than six times. That’s six times you have to scrap what you’ve got, and start over. Then, you are one signature from pulling the trigger and printing these fuckers, and some clown decides it’s time to rework the entire thing so that it looks almost identical to their current brochure. (What, you may ask is the point of redoing the brochures if it looks JUST LIKE THE EXISTING one? Apparently wasting money.) Even better, they hand me a copy of the one they are using, and blinding spelling errors abound. I mean, like in the titles of the sections. Large, 20-point font. Just awful. How, bad? Well, the title of the “Legalese” section is spelled like this: Acknolegements and Agreement.
Did anyone else just die a little bit? Because I did.

See, these are not HUGE problems, but around 9:30 this morning, I was ready to quit my job and get a minimum wage gig digging ditches. It sounded so much better than this psychological shite. This situation turns me into a bit of an educational snob. I would like to think that the people above me in my company are better educated, or experienced, or reasonably intelligent sentient beings. However it turns out I tie with my boss for the highest level of education reached. The CEO doesn’t even have a bachelor’s degree. (Not that going to college inherently makes you smart and vice versa. But, since I’ve not heard of ONE intelligent or good decision coming from those folks, I’m assuming these are the “Flunked out of junior college” kinds of people). What, pray tell do these people do? The same thing that has been done for the last 40 years. They keep doing the same things and wondering why nothing ever changes, why they aren’t growing. Whenever I ask the now-ridiculous question “Why do we do it like this?” I get “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it.” Nice, so the computer procedures that were written in 1984 still make sense today, do they? Yeah, didn’t think so.

GARGH!

And just for that, I’m going home, and smoking 12 cigarettes and drinking a HUGE vodka/cranberry. (Sidenote: If your grocery store sells cranberry/peach juice? Buy it. Buy all of it, now. You will thank me.)

Right, I’ve got a bottle of Smirnoff and a pack of Turkish Gold calling my name.