Caltrops - Still Life - Boss story #1

Forum Overview :: Still Life

by Fussbett 05/27/2005, 2:09am PDT

Hello! I've been a professional graphic designer or multimedia developer or new media artist for like 8 years. My employers are aware of this when they hire me, and I make a good hourly wage because of it. Usually more than double the wage of the fresh-out-of-college kid who works near me at any given company, sponging Photoshop tips off me. Tips like "don't use the sponge tool". I'm a veteran. In fact I'm almost embarassingly old for this job. If I don't settle down at a company soon and become an art director or project manager, people will start to talk.

This is all out the window at my current gig where the boss is a control freak who is constantly on the edge of a complete psychotic breakdown. She works all day and night, exasperatedly recounting the million task she must complete to any employee ear. We do a lot of listening and she does and lot of talking. This puts her behind in her work. Oops, another late night tonight I guess. :(

I get paid to execute her exhaustively literal and narrow creative vision; my 8 years of experience can go and fuck themselves. I don't mind, except when it gets a little insulting. FOR EXAMPLE: I have to display some magazine articles onscreen, and have a small credit graphic fly in: author and magazine names. A broadcast person calls these "Chyrons", I think. Totally standard stuff, and in this case the goal is to avoid obscuring the article as much as possible. My boss got her assistant to print out each article in question and then spent time labelling each article with a CODE that denotes the credit graphic's screen position. She then drew a DIAGRAM to illustrate exactly where the positions are and wrote a LEGEND of the codes used. Since I'm a moron and the other guy working on this has brain damage, we weren't trusted is read this documentation on our own. The boss held a 30 minute meeting to walk us through this process. She explained the code system, and showed us some example pages complete with explainations as to exactly WHY she choose "bottom left" for a particular article (Answer: because on the right side was a photo).