Turkey Tuesday

Today my lovely employers fed all the agents and staff a wonderful breakfast, and then gave them all three free games of bowling. And yes, we got paid for this as well.

There were like, 17 teams of 4 bowlers, or something like that. The teams were randomly chosen so that staff and agents were all mixed up. I for one don't bowl, it kills my shoulder plus the rest of me, so I got to sit there and watch everyone. It was actually very fun. There was a group of 4 or 5 other ladies that didn't bowl either. One of those was a girl named Elyse.

Elyse is a receptionist at one of the other offices. She is always great to talk to. I call once a week to get edits on the ads, and she's always very quick to tell me I'm awesome. :D Weirdly enough, she's cousins with Ryan, the IT guy. Who I never even talk to anymore.... I would say Elyse is about, mmm, 24, and she's just so nice and smart too. And her hair is so long and pretty!! I've seen her a couple times, and noticed that she walks very awkwardly, like her back or hips don't work right. I found out today that this is because when she was ten, she and her family were in a bad car accident, and she broke her back! She was in a wheelchair for awhile, and they thought she'd never walk again. But, obviously, she's one of those strong persistent types, and she walks all over the place. She's very inspiring.

Anyway, I sat with my co-worker Melia, who was on a team with a couple agents, the owner of the company's wife Janet, and a very nice guy named Tony who does something with billing and accounting at the office. I got to chat with everyone... Janet is so funny! So energetic and excited. And I never get to talk to Tony because he's always so busy, so that was nice. He said that he sucked at bowling, yet, he only had a couple frames where he didn't get a strike or a spare! And I had to tell him to smile when he'd bowl well! He'd turn around and just look all normal, kinda no expression.

Then I went back to work, and worked on the 2 pages of ads that we'll have this week. I don't know why it took me so long.... I guess because I just built it all from scratch, and had to change things up so much. First of all, when I got back from lunch, I had a message from this guy who had sent me emails 2 weeks ago for FOUR ads for this coming weekend, and he was upset (not like mad, or anything, more like irritated I think) that only 1 was in there (sorry, I forgot, that was 2 weeks ago!). We didn't have enough room for them, so I made some adjustments. Which caused us to end up with one extra ad that had to go on the subdivision page, and that bugged me and Kim (boss) because it just didn't look right, and it made that page pretty cluttered. So I worked on that, and about an hour before the end of the day, I got a call from Elyse asking if it was too late to cancel an open house! So I got to put that one back on its rightful page, and everything was just perfect. :)

And now its getting late... I don't want to go to bed... at least tomorrow is pretty much Friday. Except, Sam is out of the office with strep throat, and Melia will be gone... so I'll be... all... alone.... in the office. What am I going to do?? *whimper* No, it'll be nice to have some quiet creative time... but it will be weird to just be by myself all day!

Hmm. Well. Off to go read, hopefully. I have this great book from the library called Fairy Godmother by Mercedes Lackey (my fav author of all time)!! Yay! :)

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Did a quadratic formula explode?

Title is quoted from the most recent StrongBad email... anyone who has not experienced the genius that is StrongBad, needs to click here NOW. You won't regret it. In fact you'll probably laugh harder than you have in a long time.

......

Is it Friday yet??

It felt like Friday once I was done with getting stuff sent off to the paper this afternoon! I was like... ahh... I have all afternoon to look at some training stuff, learn some mad skills for InDesign and Illustrator... but then I realized... ack! Its 3:30, and I have to finish up making some edits to the ads.... but hopefully tomorrow I can do some learnin'.

I'm going to try to make this whole blog thing into more of a daily activity... I don't have much time to be doing that, but I would like to. So they might sometimes be pretty short.... but they'll be good. OK, I can't promise that either.

My friend Janet (from Animefringe) mentioned that she had a blog where she posted a random link everyday... That might be fun. I'm hoping to do that for the magazine every month.... plus she talks about how much she's written in her book for national novel month. I thought I could do a little update on how I'm coming on my articles and stuff for Animefringe! I'm so glad to be doing some writing... I've always enjoyed it, and now I can combine that with my love of anime/manga.

This month, I'm writing an feature article about the awesome series Full Metal Alchemist. Its my first feature, obviously.... but I think I'll do OK. I wrote a LOT of it tonight.. actually hand wrote it since my mom wanted me to spend some time with her and not in front of my computer. Which was good advice. That's what I do all day, everyday.

The other day, Adam and I watched a show called Re: Cutie Honey and did a little commentary on it as we watched. I typed that up, and made it into this demo thing for a possible special section in next year's issues. I'm hoping to do this, I think it would be awesome. We're going to focus on fan subs (anime subtitled by fans... the fonts are really cool, and its easier to read than other subs, it seems). We need a name. Someone suggested Double Fanvision or something like that, but Adam is planning on bringing back his beloved ADAMVISION and we can't have two titles with the same word! Any ideas for that title?

I was planning on writing an article about Hello Kitty Online World (here, watch out, its very pink) this month, but there's not much there yet, so I'm going to save that for January. You all should be sure to read January's issue when it comes out... its gonna be so awesome. December's is looking to be pretty cool too. We have two new writers!! Yay!

Well I guess that's about it for tonight... I'm gonna go read, and do some drawings too I think. And then sleep. Ahh. Sleep. And then it shall be Friday, and I can sleep IN on Saturday. Plus my little sister is coming back from school for a week (she'll be here late tonight, she better not wake me up! Hehe) and it will be fun to hang out with her.

Goodnight!! Sweet dreams to everyone (check out Andrew's dream blog)!

Update: My sister got home already!! Yay! Its good to see her. Hopefully she won't create too much chaos. ;)

Its like, an early Christmas!!

I got two presents today!! One was my new monitor at work. This thing is HUGE!! It barely fits on my desk. Although, it couldn't have just worked out perfectly fine to begin with. We unpacked it, realized it wasn't the exact one the guy told us it would be.... but it was dang huge and it's a "professional series". We looked it up, and I think its a pretty good one. Anyway, we got it all unpacked and my old one off the desk, and we went to plug the cable into the back.... and.... go figure. The "male" and "female" parts didn't match. :P The cable I had hooked up to my computer didn't fit, and they didn't send us a new one. No one anywhere had that kind of cable, so Sam went and bought a new cable. He also packed up his monitor that still needs to be sent back (he almost packed up the wrong one!) and sent that off. Hopefully he'll get his new one soon too.

The other present I got was a package full of anime stuff from my friend in Georgia! He has so much stuff... he's never going to be able to watch/read it all. Although, he won't send me stuff he intends to watch, like the DVD's he has of my favorite series, .hack//SIGN!! So I now have the whole series of Gravitation (a series that he got as screeners, but just doesn't really like, I think I might like it, it looks cute), a couple DVD's of random series I've never heard of (but look good), and a couple mangas. There's also some burnt CDs and DVDs that I'm not quite sure what's on them yet. I am so happy I got all this cool stuff! Hehe.

This has been a crazy week. At work, my office mate has been "under scrutiny" for the fact that she takes forever to do her work. No exaggeration, she spent ALL day working on a tiny little ad. I'm supposed to just check on her every once in awhile (it sounds mean, but they just need to know what's going on, and unlike my situation, there's not really any way to monitor that) and whenever I told Sam what she was doingon, he'd get more and more frustrated. He finally told me that "everyone" (the elusive group of higher-ups) have started to realize that I'm working my butt off, and they appreciate how I handle everything that gets thrown at me, and how well I am adapting. To me its not really about adapting so much, just that I'm so excited to see where this department and this company are going to go! Everything Sam talks about that he'd like to see us doing is so exciting. It will be the best learning experience of my life. I guess what is different about my job is that it is like school and work combined which is what makes it so exhausting!

Sam advised me to learn all I can on my own as well, and work on getting a grasp on the programs that we are using... like Illustrator and InDesign. I had never used either before, but I feel like I picked up on them really well. I just need to learn about the tricks and shortcuts and fun stuff like that. That way, I will have even more of an upperhand in what he sees as becoming a "two-man operation"... which means that I will have to work for my place there. As I'm getting over the drama of a couple weeks ago... I'm starting to think that it would be pretty dang cool to keep working there, because its really going to start going places.

To make the week and my life in general even more crazy, Andrew and I had another rough couple of days. We have decided to split up, but of course not stop talking and being friends. I just know that I need some time to figure things out in my life and stuff.

I have this general feeling that lately, I haven't been that good of a person... not that good of a girlfriend, friend, guild leader or co-worker... I've made a lot of mistakes. I have been getting better... I have been trying to get my priorities straight and work as hard as I can, and to do what I can to ensure that everything turns out for the best. We can't know what the best thing for us is.... we think we know... but we are often wrong. I just have to keep in mind that the most important things in life are the people I care about.

Weekends are Grrrr-eat!

Wow. This past week was crazy. The end of last week, we started getting files off the Mac while my office mate was out of town, and got the new Dell PC alllll set up. I was way excited about that. But of course, there were technical difficulties with that as well. When she got back, we discovered that new Dells often have so much stuff already installed that they are realllllly slow. So, she had issues getting her work done. I was assigned a couple pages of sub ads to help her. My other coworker was impressed that I got that done as well as my own work, and told my boss... and everyone was just happy. It was really fun, actually. Being all crazy trying to get things done right... wow. But we figured it all out, hopefully!! This week should be better.

I have a bunch of reading I should do, to learn different things about the programs I use. I'll see how much I feel like doing that tomorrow.

I'm so excited about Animefringe! If you haven't, you should check out the site beacuse this month's issue is out, and my article is in there! Wooo! All the people on that site are so awesome! Its become like a second, online home... yeah. Hehe. The crazy otaku I mentioned in a previous post, named Adam, has become a great friend! And I've bought lots more manga cause of him. Hehe.

I went to Andrew's family's cabin in Hell's Canyon this weekend. We took a couple of friends, Dave and Julie, and it was really fun. We hiked back to the waterfall near the cabin too, which we hadn't done for awhile. I did some rock climbing, and I am le tired. I should go to bed.

I will write more another time. Goodnight!

Patience is a Virtue....

....especially when you're dealing with a new PC, which is still in the process of being integrated into the workflow. The lady I share an office with came back from her vacation yesterday, and was shocked to find that we had gotten all the files transferred off the Mac, and onto the file server. She no longer had a Mac... just a PC. And I think she's scared of that thing. She needs to learn to be patient with the poor thing... yes, its a Dell, and therefore powerful, but its just not going to allow you to do as many things at once as that monster dual-processor Mac you used to have! And its going to take a minute to save things. She also has issues dealing with the file server, I don't think she gets that its a place where we can all get to files, and makes it so we don't have anything saved on an actual computer!! If that Mac had croaked, we would have been in trouble. But now its all backed up on FOUR identical hard drives through a RAID, so hopefully we're safe.

We are having problems with some file formats not switching over right, and that'll be a fun fight!! I did have a fun time working on the sub pages, which are slowly being transferred to me, so that when the new system for the readers rolls out, both me and my coworker will have about the same amount of subdivision ads to do (and we're going to have templates to use for those, so it will take even less time). Therefore we'll have time to do fun ads!! I'm working on some logos, and different things... its fun, learning Illustrator and InDesign as I go along.

Well.... I better get ready for bed. Tomorrow is Wednesday.... half way through the week. Wow. Hehe.

The Day After

Well. Today went a lot better than could have been expected. I'm still a little bitter... every once in awhile I'll think about what happened and get either really mad or just sad.

One of the bosses had mentioned yesterday that she "knew" that my coworker had been designing most of my ads for me. I was like, OK. Right. I get help from him, and I do ALL the work. So he went to talk to her about that. I went in a little later with an ad I put together for the paper, and she was like, oh, this is good. And then she looks at me and asks "are you doing alright?". I was surprised, cause I was, actually, so I said yeah.

I told my parents a bit about all this, and they think I should go talk to her again about how I couldn't have known how serious they were about the whole thing, since I've never been in a situation like this, and how she is just seeing the things I've done wrong, and not the things I've done right. I don't know if I will talk to her about it anytime soon... they just put my coworker in charge of the ad department, which means that I answer to him now. And he knows how hard I work.

I feel really good about what I got done today too. I was really happy with the reader ads (and I even gave an agent the weekend off, inadvertantly, by not having room for her open house! That was fun, made me happy), and I was looking at all the things I do and take care of, and I am proud of myself. I manage a lot of things at one time. And I feel like my design skills are improving fast!!

I have a bunch of training material that my coworker put on the server to look through... I like learning new things about photoshop, and of course learning all the things I don't know about Illustrator.

So yes. Another day, another chance to prove I'm the best graphic designer there! Hehe. :)

My Rant on Corporate America

OK, maybe not corporate as much... but the principle is the same.

A couple weeks ago, one of the higher ups at work sent out an email saying that personal email, messaging and web surfing is prohibited and is "grounds for termination". I wasn't doing it that much, but I knew it was probly more than I needed to be. So I cut back. Its hard to go all day without checking your Yahoo account, or shooting off a quick messenger note. So this week, I seriously was really careful to not let it get in the way of my work. Once a day, sometimes twice, but not often, I would send off an email, to either Adam or Andrew.. just chatting type stuff. And I'd look at all the sites that I participate in, and everything. I'm telling you. ONCE a day.

And its not like I'm a slacker at all, in fact, every week I get faster and faster at getting the ads out. After I'm done with that every week, I've got tons of other things to work on. Last Friday I was scanning stuff (ie random junk) ALL day. So while the scanner was "heating up" and taking its dear sweet time to scan, I'd pop over to Animefringe or AnimeOasis. No harm done.

I got called into the "boss's" office today. She said that she wanted to talk to me about my performance. The HR lady came in as well. They were all like, we've been tracking all the emailing and messaging you've been doing, and we're concerned. Your work on the readers is really good, but there are other things to do after that each week (duh). So ALL the time you spend here at work has to involve working.

Well, what about the REQUIRED two 15 minute breaks you get every day? Oh, those should be used to get up and walk around, and to talk to other people who are on their breaks too. Don't bother anyone that's not on break. Obviously. But isn't it MY break, and if I want to sit on my butt and check on a couple websites, what business is that of theirs?

The HR lady said that they're not here to babysit, and that this is the real world. Well, crap. I guess I'm just a little kid then huh? They made me feel like I was disrupting the whole company. "A company is only as strong as the weakest link." Direct quote. I'm a weak link because I freaking check my email? These ladies have a seriously skewed view of what technology is for.

I found out that they seriously can track EVERYTHING you do. Everything that goes through the server. So they're sitting here with a stack of printed out emails and MSN convo's... ack.

One lady said that they had proof of me saying to my coworker that by using Yahoo messenger, you can bypass the company's security measures. I was like, um, OK. I'm a serious hacker and I know things like that. What I DID say to him was that I wish MSN had a "stealth" mode like Yahoo, so that while I was at work I could easily BLOCK OUT the people I didn't need to talk to, so I'd only have the two people I work with that I need to talk to on the list. If they could have understood that, I think that would have helped.

Yesterday they turned off my MSN access. And I can't get on yahoo.com at ALL. The other thing that just makes me SO irate is the fact that the IT guy knew, he was the one who can track these things, my coworker knew, he was informed about it, the boss ladies knew, obviously, AND during a meeting, I was BROUGHT UP to the ACTUAL boss. My coworker did tell me that he was for telling me about it, and the boss agreed. But they seem to have chosen the sneaky way. Does that make more of an impression? Maybe it would if I were STUPID but I think I could have handled having my coworker, who I consider a friend, tell me that what I was still doing wasn't acceptable. So I had no indication for probably about a WEEK that this was going on. Is that right?? I really don't think so. I think they could have had the decency to tell me that they had noticed what I was doing, and just take the damn time to explain it to me. As opposed to waiting so long and just slamming me with it. Since I had been doing such great work, apparently, and not being a hinderance to the company at all, I think that it would have been the best thing to do to just talk to me about it as soon as it came up. My coworker said that this WAS a not-too-bad type meeting that I had... it could have been worse.

OK. So they said it was forbidden, yeah yeah. But, this is my first time at a big company like this, my first experience with the rights they have to see everything. How was I supposed to know that even checking things on a break or while I was doing something else was out of the question? I guess I was supposed to know that I should be looking through magazines for inspiration and walking around.

I just can't believe, as well, that no one is allowed to say anything about it. But what KILLS me, is that I asked the IT guy multiple times right after they sent out that email, whether or not they were serious, or SERIOUS. Had I know they were SERIOUS, this could have all been avoided. That would have been a great time for him to say, yeah, they can track stuff (ie, I can track stuff and just not mention that I use MSN constantly) and they are serious about it. I would have gotten the clue! And I asked my coworker too, but he just kinda spaced it, and I didn't ask him again.

Another thing they said was that I should be so happy that I have a job that I can learn at while I'm getting paid. Whoever said I wasn't? And they wonder if I'm not getting enough of a challenge. So, 15 minutes a day of being on the internet, non-work related, indicates that I'm not learning anything, or not concentrating on learning all I can, as well as implying that I'm not challenged by what I do. I love my job, most of the time... and its very challenging.

So one of the ladies said I should practice designing stuff in my "spare time".. since my coworker does all of my ads and logos for me. Ack! Seriously? He helps me figure out what the heck I'm going to do, but he does NOT do it for me in any shape or form. Unbelievable. They think they know everything because they can read your email and stuff. But they don't take the time to see how much I'm really learning. And doing.

My coworker (I'm sorry to keep saying that, I just don't want to name names... I feel bad enough ranting, but its gotta happen) helped me a lot by telling me about his experiences with this sort of thing. I did fine during the meeting, but at that point, when I was talking to him, I just couldn't not start bawling. I have always hated getting in trouble in any way, and this was just the worst ever. I work so hard, harder than I ever have. He told me that he has really appreciated all I had done and was impressed by how I've improved (cue more bawling), but I feel like the boss ladies could have emphasized that a little more instead of just treating me like a child.

Speaking of feeling like a child... an analogy that popped into my head about all this is, this is the equivalent of having a kid talk a lot in class, like in kindegarten when they're not used to the way school works, and without warning, the teacher slaps tape over the kid's mouth. Or, even, in like junior high, there's a kid writing notes in class, and so the teacher has been keeping a record of them, somehow (just go with it) and then one day takes all the paper out of all of the kid's notebooks!

OK, I know that was weird, but whatev.

So they said that we can "start over, and have a clean slate"... but did they give me back Yahoo? No. I mean, I use it for other things than email. Did they give me back MSN? No. I feel like I'm probation even though they said its fine. Plus, I've been worried, because of one of the boss's sudden lack of friendliness to me, about the fact that in a month, I'm going to not be on the staffing agency's payroll anymore, and they'll chose whether or not to hire me at this company.

Whatever. I'll get over it. I worked hard today, just like freaking always, and I hope they will notice that and make me feel better about the situation. Seriously. I feel like it is so wrong to treat someone like this, even if they are a big special company. And yeah, its not like they fired me or did anything more than slap me on the wrist, but it still sucks to know you're being spied on and everyone knows but you.

Sigh. What a day. All I can do is move on. So here goes.

Thanks for reading. Sorry to rant.