Wow, it was a rough day. It start­ed off well enough, because I was in what one would call a bet­ter-than-aver­age mood before I had even arrived at work. Shirley had stopped at Timmies to get an every­thing bagel with herb and gar­lic cream cheese for break­fast, and decid­ed to also buy me a large cof­fee, which I found, hot and steam­ing, on my desk this morn­ing. It was the first cof­fee I had in weeks, and it sent my heart rac­ing after the sec­ond sip.

I final­ized a two-page ad for a local quar­ter­ly newslet­ter, due for pub­li­ca­tion at the end of the month. The only prob­lem was that, for the last few years, we’ve had a reser­va­tion of only a sin­gle page. The mid­dle two pages of this pub­li­ca­tion are reserved for the most impor­tant mes­sages from the orga­ni­za­tion that runs the pub­li­ca­tion itself, and are most like­ly the first two pages looked at by its read­ers. My boss, besides being the best fuck­ing boss in the world, was also ambi­tious enough to request the mid­dle two pages (I think of Michael Corleone ask­ing if his cred­it is good enough to buy out Moe Green). At his behest, I made a call to nego­ti­ate the book­ing of space. I had been prep­ping for this since Monday, being unsure of how to approach the per­son at the oth­er end of the line in order to max­i­mize my chances of get­ting the two most lucra­tive pages in the book­let. They did­n’t know how old, or young, I was, because they could­n’t see me, and this was help­ful. I believe that age has worked to my dis­ad­van­tage in the past for tete-a-tete nego­ti­a­tions, because I can see in the faces of old­er peo­ple how hard it is for them to take me seri­ous­ly. At the end, I offered to reserve two pages instead of one (some­thing which they did­n’t know we had every inten­tion of doing, no mat­ter what the result), in return for the mid­dle of the book­let. I was able to get the mid­dle for this month, but unfor­tu­nate­ly not for any sub­se­quent issues. We want­ed to hit the local area hard with the ener­gy in our lat­est mar­ket­ing cam­paign, and being the first to take the mid­dle of the pub­li­ca­tion, even if only for a sin­gle issue, was good enough. I told my boss, he shook my hand, and ver­bal­ly con­grat­u­lat­ed me.

Then I quick­ly fixed up and final­ized the mailout for this month, to be print­ed on our new cov­er stock, a great idea by Shirley, because the thick­ness and bright­ness of the stock make every­thing look fuck­ing slick. By this time, the caf­feine was mak­ing me jit­tery. I had slept alright the night before, but I was start­ing to feel tired, espe­cial­ly in the eyes.

I start­ed to work on a one page fly­er to go with a spe­cial invi­ta­tion sent out to over 600 clients and poten­tial clients across the city (which also ties in with the adver­tise­ment in the local pub­li­ca­tion men­tioned above — fuck­ing wicked). My boss gave me the mate­r­i­al yes­ter­day, and the prob­lem was that it had to be approved by him before the end of the day, because he’s leav­ing the coun­try on busi­ness tomor­row.

I worked through most of the day on the fly­er while tons of oth­er mis­cel­la­neous things-to-be-done popped up spon­ta­neous­ly, like label print­ing, print­er fix­ing, and back-up trou­bleshoot­ing. By this time, the caf­feine had worn off, only to be replaced by what felt like exhaus­tion. Near the end of the day, after get­ting the fly­er most­ly done, while colour cor­rect­ing and space adjust­ing, CorelDraw start­ed to real­ly, REALLY fuck up on me. If the print­ing com­pa­nies we dealt with would actu­al­ly spend some mon­ey on high­er end vec­tor graph­ics soft­ware, I would­n’t have had any prob­lems. Instead, I tried to print a file from CorelDraw, and it either spooled for­ev­er, or told me that there was not enough mem­o­ry to print (with my 1 gig of DDR RAM). If I tried to save, it either gave me an error mes­sage about not hav­ing enough free space, or crashed, and in the process, made the cur­rent work­ing space blank and saved it. CorelDraw seems to lose sta­bil­i­ty if any oth­er pro­grams are run­ning, such as Outlook Express or Winamp, while there are graph­ics above 300 dpi in the work­space, and I had over a dozen. In the end, I got the fly­er fin­ished, but not before repeat­ing an entire series of steps, sev­er­al times, due to crash­es while fine-tun­ing.

My nerves were shot by the time I stepped out­side to walk to the bus stop. For the first time in months, I lis­tened to my on-the-go playlist. I start­ed work­ing on it since the week of UPS crash­es in November (which would bring the entire sys­tem down at work, includ­ing tele­phone access), for days just like this.