Dear customer #1:
When I say I need to know the name of your company, I am not asking for a detailed description of your logo or your packaging needs. I am asking for your company name specifically because that is how I file every piece of art that gets uploaded to us. Until I get that one piece of information, I will not be able to pull up and review the logo you are so lovingly describing to me.

Dear Customer #2:
The words “I’m not very computer literate” will not allow me to magically intuit your packaging needs, thus freeing you from the burden of going though our website and making your own decisions as to what you need to purchase from us.

grumpily yours,
Me.

Had a great barbeque with Bonnie, Mark, et al yesterday. Got home sorta late and so tired my eyes were crossing. On the way home, got stuck in the post concert traffic from the Slayer/Manson gig at PNC. Middle aged and tipsy Slayer fans are a wee obnoxious, but harmless.

This morning, on the other hand, I woke up feeling monday morning crappy, and haul my ass into work. But the internet is down. Then we find that the whole network has taken a dump. Then I find that I have to rebuild my PC damm near from scratch. As of 5:00, I was 3/4 of the way finished with that.

Screw leaving the house. I shouldn’t have gotten out of bed.

Getting stuck working the NY Gift show at the Javits center twice a year is slightly hellish (crappy customers, long hours, and no time to wander though the very nice handmade section), but working the yearly food show is indeed a treat. Nothing makes people happier than good alcohol and gourmet food. Happy people = happy customers who do not make my life suck.

Also, there’s the samples. Lunch hour means wandering from booth to booth blissing out on samples of gourmet cheese, lemon stuffed olives, mohito flavored agave based gelato, and *chocolate*. Specifically, cosmic chocolate. And then there were our next door neighbors, who were selling something called Cricket Cola. It’s got cane sugar, kola nut, green tea, and cola. It tastes phenomenal - as if your coke got a class upgrade to the Waldorf Astoria, and the balls of a pro soccer player. - if you haven’t seen this yet, I think you might like it. :)

This doesn’t even cover whole energy drinks section downstairs, notable because there are a lot of international vendors from countries that haven’t banned ephedra. Last year Bill came home with the most interesting assortment of… well I guess you could call it candy. (They were chocolate coated at least.)

It totally makes the sore feet at the end of the day worth it.

Apparently, too well. Today we experienced the joys of having one’s car stolen. No one was *in* said car at the time, nothing irreplaceable was in the car, and the cops found it just a few hours later. Minus, I’m told, many of the parts that make it particularly car-like. (Seats, battery, fender, bumper….)

So I now have a nice blue claim ticket that I get to take to city hall (ok, a building right next to city hall) in 3-5 working days, and they will return to me a vaguely car-shaped pile of metal. And I should be contacted by my insurance claims adjuster tomorrow.

On the upside, I can relax and not worry about driving to work for the near future. Bill and Dom get to play rock/paper/scissors for that tomorrow. Yes, I’m being glass half full girl…. ’cause why not? I work in the toilet section of Newark. Bring you car around there long enough, and your number will come up. So today was my day. Life’s like that sometimes. And it’s a little refreshing to having a spot of bad luck that just randomly happened, and wasn’t in any way due to me bing a ditz.

you want ribbons fast
with printing for your wedding
not gonna happen

three weeks it takes to
get a ribbon order done
you want it friday

but it’s my wedding
the customer’s always right
give me your boss now

sure crazy lady
go whine at my boss - he’ll just
hang up on your plight

no printing this time
you should have made better plans
plain ribbon for you

Yes, we will send you up to two free proofs on your art or typesetting. After that, we charge for them. No, you really can’t sneak one in through the back door by asking for just one more eensy weensy change that you don’t need to see before sending the job to press.

If you request a change, you have to see and approve it. No exceptions. If you don’t want to pay for extra proofs, get your ducks in a row BEFORE you give me the changes.

In the space of one week, Bill:

• Was fired released from bondage at Trade Thermo. (soul sucking bastards…)
• Started school. He’s going for his psych degree. So very cool. (And I’m jealous… I miss the ivory tower.)
• Got a new job. At US Box. With me. (and Loretta).

Holy shit people, I have begun Planet Paintball, part 2. And aside from that… just insert happy dancing. ‘Cause wheeee! I get to work in the same building as him! (but not at the next desk - that would probably incur homicidal urges in both our hearts) And he no longer has to worry all the time about me working in the worst part of Newark! And there’s another smart person in the office!

I’d probably spend the rest of the evening doing the happy dance, but work calls. Le sigh.

Dear customer -
We do not accept email attachments. Any email attachments. The fact that you already uploaded a file or two through our handy dandy upload center would bear out that you already understand this. So why are you attaching revised graphics to your damm email correspondence? This is not a pointless hoop we’re making you jump though - this is a computer security policy enacted company wide that I do not have the authority or desire to fight. Why? Because email WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE A MEANS OF FILE TRANSFER. That’s why we have FTP. That’s why we’ve made such a nice web interface for our FTP server just for you.

GAH!

I don’t care that the two minutes of thought required to fill out a web form is icky and a pain in the ass and just too damm inconvient for you to be arsed with. I don’t care that you never glanced at the file requirements that we spent a LOT of time writing up. If you can’t be arsed to work with us just a teensy bit, I can’t be arsed to care when your order is late.

My department needs a FAQ for all the graphics questions the customers don’t actually *ask*, but assume they should be helped with anyway. A FAQ for everyone who wouldn’t read it, seeing as they don’t read the painfully obvious file guidelines and upload instructions that we have up there already

It should be noted that this FAQ doesn’t actually exist. We’re not going to add yet another block of verbiage on the company site that the customers will invariably ignore. This is just me grouching off.

I uploaded a ZIP/SIT file. Why can’t you use it?
Nice answer: The file within the archive still must be of a type that we accept. For example, a zipped Microsoft Word file will upload succussfully, but we will be unable to do anything with it upon arrival.

My answer: Sorry, you are not so special that the rules we have in place for everyone else will be waived just for you. As soon as I see the extension .doc or .rtf or .wpd or ANYTHING ELSE that resembles a word processing file, I toss the whole thing into the bit bucket. You can either email it to me as good old fashioned plain text, or print and fax it over. In spite of what the spiked kool aid is telling you, MS Word does not produce graphics files.

Can you take my logo from my website?
Nice answer: Web graphics are good for on screen display, and often print tolerably from home printers, but will not print acceptably from a professional press. Unless you also have a high resolution version of your logo/graphic on your website for download, you will need to upload a print quality graphic to us.

My answer: What am I - your trained monkey? I’m not hunting through your site hoping to find the correct unusable image. The web is not print, and print is not the web. Not that you’ll have any idea what I’m talking about here. No - your cheap ass web graphic looks bad *now* and will only look worse if we sent it to press. That is, if it ever got on press, since I’m certain that the pressmen would look at it and fall down laughing.

I sent a TIF/EPS/etc… file - why you can’t you use it?
Nice answer: Regardless of file type, the graphic still has to be of the correct resolution and quality. We cannot take low resolution images or poor quality scans “as is” although we may be able to clean them up to an acceptable standard for an additional charge.

My answer: You moron. Saving that logo from your website in a spiffy new format does not change the fact that is is still a web graphic. Please reboot your brain.

I’m using MS Publisher/Photo Impact/MS Word/PowerPoint/etc… Can you help me export the correct file?
Nice answer: We do not offer tech support for software. The only software that we can “walk you through” for basic problems are the following titles:
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Illustrator
WinZip
Stuffit

My answer: Do I *look* like tech support?

• WBH Swim updates
• Plonked down approx. $1,600 for plane tickets to Ireland. (Finally taking the out of country trip. Wheee!)
• Kept all my day job clients (mostly) happy.
• Began re-designing the US Box envelopes. (I’ve already revamped their order forms and invoices)
• Visited the bookstore. (On orders from Bill. Apparently, I’ve begun stressing so much that I’m becoming hard to live with.)
• Called my Dad.
• Planned what I’ll be taking on the plane trip.

What I need to do tonight:

• Finish coding the 1,000+ items for S4
• Finish redesign work for BubbleBliss (not yet live)
• Finish site updates for DragonFolk

No, I’m not going to finish all this tonight. Hence the stress.

What I need to do later this week

• Submit my passport paperwork
• Finish my taxes
• Figure out a way to stop stressing.