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.