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.

I was given the oppor­tu­nity to pur­chase a new machine (with my choice of parts) at work and put it together from scratch, some­thing I had never done before. I’ve dab­bled in cases ever since I played games (the dri­ving force behind much of my com­puter knowl­edge), but never actu­ally assem­bled an entire box from parts.

It’s amaz­ing to see how far along moth­er­boards, and even cases, have come now. Overclocking can be done through soft­ware, as opposed to open­ing the case and fid­dling with jumpers. Fan speed is auto­mat­i­cally con­trolled for a bal­ance of silence and cool­ing. Rail mounted drive bays make hard­ware con­fig­u­ra­tions much sim­pler. Thumbscrews elim­i­nate the need for screw­drivers for a sim­ple dust­ing. Firewire ports, eth­er­net con­nec­tions, video sup­port, even 5.1 sur­round are all built onboard, for the option of extremely clean, roomy, and cool cases, even if they are rather simple.

I man­aged to put the sys­tem together with­out hav­ing to re-seat a card, clean a con­nec­tion, or wig­gle a power cable. My machine is now a P4 3.2E (I sup­pose all higher end Pentium chips now auto­mat­i­cally come with hyper-threading), with a gig of DDR RAM, a 200 GB serial-ATA HDD, and a 128 MB ATI 800XT Pro video card. I also requested another 17″ flat panel, and received it the next day, so I can take advan­tage of the dual dis­play goodness.

Work was good, but now it’s just bet­ter.

I’m learn­ing more things at work than I had ever imag­ined was pos­si­ble. Now I under­stand things like the impor­tance of mak­ing a bud­get, the loop­holes to look out for on a lease, the dif­fer­ence between writ­ing an asset off as an expense or depre­ci­at­ing it, or even some­thing like the eco­nomic fac­tors con­sid­ered in set­ting monthly goals. There are also gen­eral work things I never knew about, like how to deal with sales­men, how to leave mes­sages, what’s con­sid­ered a good health plan, gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions vs. union reg­u­la­tions, etc. I’ve even had to learn how to be a print pro­duc­tion coor­di­na­tor for marketing/PR mate­ri­als. Then on top of all of this, I’m learn­ing about the entire eso­teric den­tal indus­try, from the per­son­al­i­ties of den­tists and den­tur­ists to the man­u­fac­tur­ing process of every­thing from crowns to cast par­tial den­tures to haw­ley retain­ers, just so I can under­stand the tar­get audi­ence and under­stand what I’m marketing.

I now run the IT depart­ment for a lab­o­ra­tory of about 45 peo­ple. I’m in charge of all instal­la­tions, upgrades, main­te­nance, back-ups, and secu­rity for both hard­ware and soft­ware. I make the annual com­puter bud­get, decide if/when any­thing needs to be pur­chased, and am involved with any devel­op­ment projects that come up. I can design my own projects if I feel like they’ll help the com­pany. I’m involved in mar­ket­ing, design­ing ads for mag­a­zines, fly­ers, trade shows, and webpages.

I have a huge desk that cov­ers three sides, and share an office (not a cubi­cle) with one other per­son. I have a health plan, two weeks paid vaca­tion per year, and most of the time I make my own work instead of some­one telling me what to do. The indus­try is grow­ing, secure, and has lit­tle impact from gov­ern­ment cutbacks.

My boss is a good man with a great vision. The com­pany pays for any train­ing or classes that I take. I can spend as much time as I need doing tuto­ri­als or reading

I’ve signed the con­tract. I’ve been given a time­card, a locker, and a set of keys to the office and stor­age room. The hours are flex­i­ble enough for me to fin­ish courses for this term, at which point I’ll switch only to work.

As with all my pre­vi­ous jobs, the first pay­cheque goes to my grand­moth­ers, the sec­ond pay­cheque I split with my friends, the third pay­cheque goes to my savings.

I’ve started the per­fect, per­fect, per­fect career.