I am, I swear, going to kill my boss with my bare hands. I work for a very, very small non-profit. I am, in fact, the only paid employee. I do some of the maintenance-type things–keep the mailing list, update the website, and publish the newsletter.
The damn newsletter. See, when I was hired, I was told I’d be responsible for publishing it, and I might occasionally have to write an article or two, you know, every now and then, so how was my writing? My writing is fine.
Yeah, I know. You all saw it coming a mile away. I have to write the whole damn newsletter. Every time. Every now and then, a board member writes a review or something, so I put that in. Otherwise, it’s all me.
Now, my boss is the president of the non-profit’s board. He’s actually a decent human being. But he’s so fucking anal-retentive, I swear the shit has backed up into his brain. He proofreads every newsletter. Which is fine, I don’t mind the backup. But he drives me crazy. One day, he told me he noticed that one article (that, for a wonder, I didn’t write, and so had pasted in) had only one space between sentences, and another one had two, and that was unprofessional, so could I please go through the whole document and make sure the spacing between every sentence was consistent? (We do this over the phone, btw, since we don’t actually have an office. He picks up hard copies from my porch whenever he has a chance, and then calls me with corrections.)
While he’s proofreading, he’ll decide there should be formatting changes. Does he tell me what the change is? Oh, no. He edits the text (on paper, remember, so he has no idea how this will actually come out on the document) in an attempt to change the way the text falls on the page. After four hundred tiny little text changes, he says, “Now, do you have room to put in this extra sidebar?”
God damn it, just tell me you want to add a sidebar!!! I’ll fucking make it fit if I have to jam it on the fucking disk with a fucking crowbar! It would have taken me three seconds of dragging a text box, but instead I’ve just spent a half hour making pointless changes. Or here’s another favorite–“Take ‘that’ out of the third line in the second paragraph, it isn’t necessary.” Fine, I think, stylistic change, makes sense. “Now, change ‘will have been’ to ‘will be.’ “ Hokay, fine. Seventeen tiny changes like this later, he says, “Does that get rid of the orphan at the bottom of the fifth paragraph?”
God damn. Mother fucking. Son of a bitch. If you had just said “You missed an orphan at the bottom of the fifth paragraph,” I could have fixed it with one, count it, one, uno, ein, more than zero and less than two, keystrokes. Instead you’ve wasted ten minutes of my time, and doubtless a half an hour of yours trying to guess what the fucking program will do with the fucking text. I try to catch him now by asking every time, “Is this a stylistic change, or are you trying to make room for something?” But it gets old, and it doesn’t always work, because sometimes when he gets going on a train of thought he doesn’t want to stop, and he can’t conceive of approaching the problem any other way.
So lately he says to me that the newsletter isn’t looking zippy enough, you know, it should be really eye-catching and cool looking. Now, they knew when they hired me that I had no background in graphic design or layout, no actual publishing experience, and I’m doing this with Word 97, because that’s what I’ve got and this is a very, very small non-profit. They can’t afford to go buying me PageMaker or whatever. Fine. I’m doing the best I can. I’m at the very edge of my abilities here. And then he says, “It needs to be more information-dense.” So I packed this last one with information. Looked crap up and wrote like hell every night for a week, trying to make sure there was lots of information in the latest newsletter.
Guess what? Now he tells me there’s too much text. And can’t I make the newsletter look more like the ones my predecessor turned out? Well, no, I can’t. He wasn’t using fucking Word 97, and he had some background in graphic design. I’m doing my best.
I’m doing my best not to kill the man.
Now, let us make a short detour to the Post Office. For a long time, it was taking the USPS anywhere from two to four weeks to deliver the newsletter. And the vast majority of our mailing list is in the same city I’m mailing from. I was blamed for this, initially, since I obviously wasn’t mailing it out on time. Eventually, after weeks in Phone Purgatory, I discovered that our newsletter, which I had, on the advice of the good folks at the Business Mail Entry Unit, been sending Upgradeable (meaning the sorting could be done by machine) was not, in fact, eligible for upgradeable, and was not able to be scanned by the machine. So I went back to sorting it non-upgradeable. Quick delivery–I nearly died of shock. But this last one took two weeks, and came with an adhesive tab on the side that I definitely did not put there. Some fool decided to put the thing on the machines, damn the tray tags, they would rather spend five hours tabbing the damn newsletter (I know it takes that long, I’ve done it before) than send them over to the hand-sorting facility (where they should have gone in the first place) and be done with it. Surprise! The machine couldn’t read them. So they were put aside until the folks who work the machines had nothing better to do.
I am, my boss tells me, supposed to fix this. Fortunately, I have complete power over Post Office employees. They are slaves to my all-dominating will. I have only to explain nicely to them not to do this again, and they will obey, abjectly apologizing for their incompetence, in terror of my wrath. I do no housework whatever, because Post Office employees troop in and out of my house all day, scrambling over each other to gain my favor. I have only to mention a wish, and letter-carriers go glassy-eyed and intone, “It is the will of Bren_Cameron,” and march off, zombie like, to do my bidding.
I am beginning to run out of steam now, which was the whole point of writing this to begin with, so I can get on with the rest of the gods-cursed newsletter. Which I’ve had to reformat three times because Mr. Boss didn’t like it, and which now will require another complete overhaul because Mr. Boss has decided to consolidate two articles, and wants a third on the front page, where it absolutely will not fit. It’s the part of the job I’m not good at, the part I sweat over because I know I suck at it, and I have to keep doing it over and over. I asked him to please give me final proofreading of the text so I could finish the formatting without worrying about changes he might make, but apparently I’m supposed to do all the layout first and then do the writing. And there’s actually an article I’m not writing that I haven’t got yet, but I’m supposed to magically know how it will look on the page. And did I mention it has to go out on Monday? And it takes Kinkos at least 24 hours to print and fold the bastard thing? And it takes me 6-8 hours to label and sort it? Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Don’t get me wrong–generally, I actually enjoy this job. I can do it from home, I like meeting the people, I actually do like writing, the board of directors is a nice bunch of people, and like I said, the boss is really a decent human being. He’s just fucking batshit, is all, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to knock him unconscious with my Word 97 manual.
