I love my job but...

[Funt Solo]

::"and 'drink up, go home' means just that."

I've been on both sides of that one:  

As bar staff, you see a herd of drunken cattle and wish you had a cattle prod to get the 'orrible things out so you can clean up and go home - after all, you get paid a pittance etc.

As bar customers, you can't figure out why they let you buy a pint seemingly two seconds ago and now they're barking at you and looking at you as if you're drunken cattle that they wish they could electrocute.

---

Oddly, this seems particularly British.  When I was in Oz (and maybe I was just lucky) the method of removing people was more like "hi, I wonder, if you wouldn't mind, but we were thinking of closing up..."  

When someone's that polite, you find the inner strength to polish off your drink quick smart and make a hasty exit.

[Banners]

...hate it when clients insist that blurry, badly-lit, lo-res images taken on their phone should be used instead of professionally-taken stock images.

This happens on the same type of job as when you put a great deal of time & effort into a top-notch design, only for the client to insist that the original which they knocked-up in Word is better - and ultimately what they want printed.

Slowly, genius artwork turns into a mere InDesign version of what they started with, and you begin to wonder, "What's the point of me?"

M@

[johnnystress]

haha

similarly they hire you because you can use the latest version of Flash to do a high-end, all singing all dancing ,whistles and bells, mutimedia interactive 'learning experience' and they come back and say " sell we'd like it to be more like the powerpoint presentation we sent you"


Ladies with biceps? lisa Lyons aaaalright in my book:0http://www.artnet.com/artwork_images_140199_178269t_Robert-Mapplethorpe.jpg">

[Jim_Campbell]

"This happens on the same type of job as when you put a great deal of time & effort into a top-notch design, only for the client to insist that the original which they knocked-up in Word is better - and ultimately what they want printed.

Slowly, genius artwork turns into a mere InDesign version of what they started with, and you begin to wonder, "What's the point of me?""

And that, right there, is the other reason I abandoned design work ...

Because even fairly basic software lets people produce something that looks vaguely like a logo, no-one sees why they should have to pay for it these days.

I once spent two whole days on a brochure that a customer had done in Publisher. He insisted that it was printed exactly as he'd supplied it.

Except that all his proofs were done on a six-colour inkjet and his images were RGB.

Two days, just to make his document look the way he wanted and match his crappy layout. I could have done him something lovely from scratch in about four hours, including doing the scans myself instead of having to extract them from the Publisher job, get them into Photoshop, etc, etc ...

[Sigh]

Cheers!

Jim

[Banners]

I did a whole load of animal-related logo concepts recently - and all of them got trounced by an image the client nicked off Google and asked me to copy for the eventual design. I did so with a heavy heart.

It's frustrating when things like that happen, but it's evened out by the occasions when you get comments back that show a client is very impressed and you've delivered exactly what they wanted - and sometimes even exceeded their expectations.

M@

[thinky]

i hand my notice in tomorrow to go contracting again, with my short-lived attempts at working for other people being files under "go fuck yourself"

the worst thing is having to stay there for 4weeks and be glared at for not being flexible enough to do an extra 8 hours a week unpaid

thinky

[Carlsborg Expert]

I had a great job up until recently where we all told each other to go fuck ourselves on a regular basis. There's very few places where this works so well.



I was a local roadie and the fun to be had.....

[Jim_Campbell]

"I did a whole load of animal-related logo concepts recently - and all of them got trounced by an image the client nicked off Google and asked me to copy for the eventual design. I did so with a heavy heart."

Oh God, the horror ...

I remember doing a mini-catalogue for a shoe shop. Bear in mind that almost half the stuff in there was New Rock product, or variations thereon.

I found this fantastic font (Dmitri, I think), a great, heavy, angular thing - all straight lines and 45? angles - lower case the same height as upper. The company name was VIVID and the word looked fantastic in this font - changing the first 'I' to an exclamation mark made the logo look like it should read the same upside down (although it actually didn't) and I finished the thing off with a lovely distressed metal texture and a bevel.

Looked fucking great. I'd seen the shop and some stationery, and there was no specific branding - design-wise, they were a mess.

"Oh, no," says the client, "we wanted the logo to look like this."

... And produces a piece of paper with the word VIVID, all in caps, Comics Sans, with a rainbow fill left to right.

AAAAAH!

Jim

[Tanky]

Funt: I noticed that in Oz too. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work quite as well in central Portsmouth. Hence the yelling!

And many thanks to all the charmers in the.. er... bicep massive!

New sign behind the bar which made me chuckle:
'Due to the current water shortage, our beer will now be served at full strength and solid objects will now replace the occasional playful spray with the soda gun'
Heh!

[ThryllSeekyr]

I don't work, but I am starting to get itchy feet.

I also hate working under other people.

I would love to be self employed.

Best way to be.

But I would naturally work what ever hours I like.