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Man, I got this second job at a local newspaper man...the bastards are primitive as all hell there. Check it out:
There's this psycho ***** named Betty. She's a crazy old hag, a fatty with cheese who's three thousand years old and has never had a good roll in the way with anyone besides her dog. She's the most bitter miserable human being on earth.
Well, this lady Betty has terminal cancer. Rather than live out the rest of her days as best she can manage, she just walks around criticizing everything. Now, she is also an ex-teacher. So, on top of being insanely bitter about her cancer, being generally hateful towards everyone, and being a complete douchebag, she also hates on young people and men particularly (cause she was ugly her whole life and never got any play).
So needless to say, we've clashed a few times. The most recent of which was over a paper clip holder. See, her hard drive died a week ago, and I noticed that these paper clip holders we have around are all magnetic, and all of them are significantly demagnetized.
When I brought up the possibility to her that this was how her hard drive got ****ed, she chuckled cheerily and snidely at the same time, called me "Young man" and told me in no uncertain terms that I was apparently insulting her intelligence. She went on a tangent about the way I keep MY office--where she has to go to print her one page every other day--and in response to the paper clip holder thing, brought up how I had bent a paper clip straight and left it on my desk.
****ing stupid, eh?
I flipped out and through the clip holder against the wall, shattering it. She started ranting but instead I kicked in the front of the desk she was at and yelled at her to shut up. She instantly quieted when I got violent; some people just only understand that sort of thing, even medicated and retarded as she is.
Well, the next day (yesterday), the douchebag is sitting her tankass at a computer which has happily frozen. She calls me over.
"My disk is stuck. Do you know how to get it out?"
I happily pick up a paper clip, and bend it straight, just like the one she complained about. I made sure to do this right in her face, letting the gesture drip with spite.
Then I go to use it in the pinhole on the disk drive. She starts telling me, "Oh no, no no, that can't be right"...but pop, out comes the disk.
She said, "Thank you."
I said, "I'd say your welcome, but that would, you know, imply that you're welcome. And you're not." and I flicked the clip in her face.
Man, this ****ing job sucks.
- There is NO network. For a modern daily newspaper, that is unheard of.
- No CD burners either. We do everything by way of disks
- We use all Macs (not that uncommon), but almost all of them are OS8 or 7. They are so old that they cannot read PC-formatted disks AT ALL (normally they read just very slowly). The computers even recently turned away a burnt cd because they can't read writables.
- Check out this ILL software list:
- Photoshop 2.0+4.0 LE
- Quark Express 3 (currently up to 6.1, I believe...but it's made worse because they go in decimals of 10's...we have 3.32, and it's up to 6.1 or so...)
- Acrobat 4
- IE4
- Netscape Navigator (Yes, the OLD SCHOOL ONE, that was out to compete with like, Prodigy dialup)
- You photoshop jocks might know this but the default Adobe color profile is from 1998 on considered the industry standard for digital imaging on the web. The computers in work largely predate 1998, and thus, predate the color profile...meaning simple jpegs won't even read unless they're converted to grayscale or the old hideous profile.
- I sent a 200dpi image that was 6x6 inches to the printer and it took a half an hour to finally come out.
- They still print out the pages, then cut them up on what's called a pasteboard. Then they paste them together in the final layout for the paper. When they met me they were shocked by all the technological stuff I knew, but when I saw that I was totally awed. They were confused, and then I explained: when I was in college, they talked about it, but never at length, because it was thought that no currently operating papers in heavy circulation in the US still did it.
- The place is run by an incredibly cheap and annoying old man, in his 80s. He is completely senile and has no idea what he's doing anymore. His two sons run the rest of the company but they don't have any type of clear cut policies or anything. The place is just a mess.
- There's this ****ing scanner we have, the scanjet4c by HP. It's been broke for a while; the HDD is corrupting and won't let me access the software. It is literally like the second desktop flatbed scanner ever made. I told them, "I can fix it if you give me the cd." Of course no one knows where it is. So I go on the busted ass powermac dialup machine (the only machine with internet access in the place), and look it up. It gives me two options for drivers: MacOS8, or Windows 3.1.
- The toner in our one good printer is low. They are completely unaware of how to change it.
- They hire outside computer technicians to come in and install programs or zip drives and such.
- THIS IS A BIGGIE, people: THERE ARE NO DIGITALLY CREATED DOCUMENTS IN THE ENTIRE COMPANY. Time sheets are hand drawn and xeroxed; forms for advertisements are done the same way. There is no email or memo or voicemail system set up; it's all done with ripped off pages of crappy paper and hand-written notes. When I get an ad to design, it's usually a really bad fax printout that is all cut up and pasted together VAGUELY in the shape it is eventually supposed to be. Everything is written by hand. EVERYTHING. The sheet you sign your credit card numbers on when you take an ad out included.
- These people don't understand ANY concepts regarding computers AT ALL, even the most basic stuff. I told one of the girls who was scanning something for me, "Save it to this folder" and she was like "...ooh boy, you'd better write that down for me cause I'll forget!"
- I've been *****ing to them to get a new scanner--WE NEED IT, WE'RE A NEWSPAPER FOR CHRIST'S SAKE--for over two weeks. They keep pushing it off, telling me to fix it. I showed them the dates on the computer and on the scanner software--the comp is 1994, the scanner 1996. The **** is ten years old!! GET A NEW ONE!!
- The Old Man will come in and ***** that I spent a certain amount of time there. They are extremely CHEAP--which is infuriating because my advertisements that I make for them earn them thousands of dollars which lines their pockets way before ever reaching the company.
- We're not allowed to turn on most of the lights, to save electricity. The cut up and paste up the pages in the dark! We're also supposed to shut off any computer equipment all the time unless we have to use it...which means I get a photo I need to scan, I go out and boot up the computer and the scanner, then I scan, then shut it all off to repeat the process 15 minutes later when a new photo comes in.
There's this psycho ***** named Betty. She's a crazy old hag, a fatty with cheese who's three thousand years old and has never had a good roll in the way with anyone besides her dog. She's the most bitter miserable human being on earth.
Well, this lady Betty has terminal cancer. Rather than live out the rest of her days as best she can manage, she just walks around criticizing everything. Now, she is also an ex-teacher. So, on top of being insanely bitter about her cancer, being generally hateful towards everyone, and being a complete douchebag, she also hates on young people and men particularly (cause she was ugly her whole life and never got any play).
So needless to say, we've clashed a few times. The most recent of which was over a paper clip holder. See, her hard drive died a week ago, and I noticed that these paper clip holders we have around are all magnetic, and all of them are significantly demagnetized.
When I brought up the possibility to her that this was how her hard drive got ****ed, she chuckled cheerily and snidely at the same time, called me "Young man" and told me in no uncertain terms that I was apparently insulting her intelligence. She went on a tangent about the way I keep MY office--where she has to go to print her one page every other day--and in response to the paper clip holder thing, brought up how I had bent a paper clip straight and left it on my desk.
****ing stupid, eh?
I flipped out and through the clip holder against the wall, shattering it. She started ranting but instead I kicked in the front of the desk she was at and yelled at her to shut up. She instantly quieted when I got violent; some people just only understand that sort of thing, even medicated and retarded as she is.
Well, the next day (yesterday), the douchebag is sitting her tankass at a computer which has happily frozen. She calls me over.
"My disk is stuck. Do you know how to get it out?"
I happily pick up a paper clip, and bend it straight, just like the one she complained about. I made sure to do this right in her face, letting the gesture drip with spite.
Then I go to use it in the pinhole on the disk drive. She starts telling me, "Oh no, no no, that can't be right"...but pop, out comes the disk.
She said, "Thank you."
I said, "I'd say your welcome, but that would, you know, imply that you're welcome. And you're not." and I flicked the clip in her face.
Man, this ****ing job sucks.