Weekly Trashing: These office hours are killing me.
Warning: This is just a job dissatisfaction rant. You may find little to no value in this; unless you want something to help you feel better about your own situation.
Now I know that I could be doing MUCH worse in life. I make enough that I can afford an apartment in one of the better parts of Hollywood proper…but it’s not much. I’m still sitting at about $3,000 less than I should be making… in Nebraska. So that doesn’t say much for my negotiating skills when I accepted the job. But, Fuck It. At the time I was living in the worst situation in my entire life (in Burbank) and I just straight up needed the money. It was the 2nd job I applied for, so I thought it was “lucky” or “meant to be”. (I could be doing shit work at Liquid Generation and driving all the way down to Wilshire.)
Before you go any further, please note that I start spewing some really honest feelings about my situation it should also be noted that this blog is semi-anonymous and NOWHERE does it contain MY NAME, Where I work or the companies of ANY of our clients. So don’t fire me for writing what almost everyone else is already thinking! Let’s continue…
I don’t think that I would hate my job so much if the hours weren’t so terrible, but I work 9am to 7pm Monday through Friday with very few holidays. I’m told that for Entertainment Graphic Designers that this is the Norm. Well then I am in the wrong fucking business. Sometimes I leave closer to 8 (Once or twice a week). I’ve left at 11 before (mostly my fault and a stupid last minute deadline). One time we had to come in both Saturday AND Sunday. I try to leave closer to 6:30 (which is still lame), BUT… and this is the fucked up thing: NOBODY ELSE TRIES TO LEAVE EARLY. Working like a fucking drone is ENCOURAGED —NAY! EXPECTED!
WHATHEFUCK!
Today I was at a REALLY REALLY GOOD stopping point at 6:30 and I always have a million things to do after work so I thought I’d scoot. But of course I was asked if I still had shit to do in a way that made me feel like I was somehow skipping out on responsibility. What? Am I supposed to stay ’til 8 like you fuckers because we are swallowing more of a workload then we have time for? WHY THE FUCK DO YOU THINK THIS IS MYYYYY PROBLEM!
I am in the wrong business. I have a STUDIO art degree. I can paint, weld, screenprint, cast, sculpt, make paper and half a dozen other things that my college debt taught me. I’ve spent hundreds of probably thousands of hours in art studios from 8 pm to 4 am and loved every minute of it. Why the fuck am I staring at a goddamned screen for 50 hours a week?! (5 hours +/-) It’s killing my eyes! No bullshit, my contact perscription has gone down OVER A FULL POWER in the year-and-a-half that I have been doing this job. By the way, my “health insurance” does not include vision. I’m Cavity Free thanks to our Dental Plan! Big deal, I’m fucking blind! I am what my Optometrist called “An Ideal Candidate for Lasik”. Sounds great, man. But I can’t afford Lasik AND living here on what I’m being paid.
I took a job satisfaction quiz online while checking my mail (not on the clock of course) and it told me that I have a 28% satisfaction rating in my current position. Wonderful. Glad we are in a recession and jobs are evaporating. A little bit more math for you: I took my “Take Home Pay” ÷ “Hours Worked” and it = Pathetic. Waiters make more than I do. I think MESSENGERS make more than I do. But it’s cool; I have “benefits”! Funny thing though. I still owe about $400 in medical bills that my insurance didn’t cover. I didn’t think that making sure I don’t have CANCER was “elective”.
Well, It’s time for me to go to bed now. I got yelled at for being late this morning. Usually I saunter in between 9:15 and 9:30 but apparently that’s not good enough because we are appeasing clueless marketing fuckheads (they’re killing the Creative Directors so we can keep reaching for the lowest common denominator) in the Eastern Time Zone who are already at lunch when we are supposed to roll into the office. They expect revisions then and another set before they take off. This further proves that I no longer have a CREATIVE profession. Motherfucker, artists work at night!
I am reduced to what MonkeyArtAwards refers to as “A Life-Wasting Pixel Pusher”. Maybe 5% of my job is creative. Its more like playing Tetris with text and images, but not fun. (The Images aka “Assets” are very limited in number and quality making our job suck even more). So I fuck up and miss a lot of stupid mistakes strictly because I don’t care. I tried, I cared the 6 months to a year or so until I figured out that this job is a dead end. Even if I do this for 10 more years I’ll be no different than now, plus some sort of profit sharing crap. And I take no satisfaction in my work because usually I’m just “picking up” and repurposing some stupid bullshit that someone else got paid to originally make whereas my idea got shit on for being “too far out there” or “not retardedly GENERIC”. When I’m lucky…I get to play “Mad Surgeon” by Frankensteining some Elf Body Parts together to make clever holding devices. And I swear to fuck, we spend half of the goddamned year working on SHITTY CHRISTMAS MOVIES. Yeah, I get it, Santa can’t deliver the toys so the underdog has to do it. Where’s Dudley Moore when you need him?
So I am officially late to bed. I’m going now, because I need to keep the vicious cycle going until someone figures out that I can do a million creative things that don’t involve staring at this fucking screen and speeding up my arthritis. Good night and Congratulations to my co-author AliUptown on HER NEW AWESOME JOB!
***Bonus: My daily schedule***
8:30 am – Wake up to be tortured by another inevitably beautiful sunny Southern California day that I don’t get to enjoy.
9:10 - Drive on the treacherous 101 up to the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Add 10 degrees plus humidity, remove the hills and scenery.
9:25 – Saunter into work and feel the stares of jealous co-workers in awe of the guts of my slack.
9:30 – Check unreasonable demands from clients asking to make the design more cluttered and gaudy. Send off revisions.
10 – Grab a little breakfast nosh. Listen to podcasts or iPod to shut my brain up when it’s telling me to just get up and leave, push ahead until lunch break.
1 pm – Eat lunch at work, attempt LA Times crossword (can hardly finish Wed or later).
1:45 – Attempt to check emails and other important notes from the outside world in my last 15 mins of lunch hour. Sometimes get bugged about some crap that needs to be finished…dude, I’m at lunch, pretend I’m invisible for the next 15 mins.
2 - Finish that whatever, prep FedEx or Messenger of prints.
3 - Try not to fall asleep. Try not to eat the candy the boss keeps purchasing. I’m convinced that he is trying to keep us fat and therefor planted in our chairs and working.
6 - Almost done with afternoon revisions or activity. Eyes starting to give out.
6:30 - Although at a good stopping point AND with completely blurry vision, milky contact lenses, and red eyes… pretend to be able to work another half hour when I should be leaving…
7 - Leave work as 1st or 2nd one out. Feel convicting stares from my sado-masochistic workaholic co-slaves. (Note: Most of the studios are on “Summer Hours” right now which means they take half days and leave way fucking early on fridays. This in no way effects when we get to leave. We get maybe 1 holiday off for every 5 the studios get. Because like I said, we slaves.)
7:30 – If still working on things stay until 7:30 or 8… but like I said, BLURRY VISION. Will probably half to fix errors I missed because at 7:30, BRAIN SHUTS OFF.
8 – Crawl home having seen little to no actual sunlight, Make Dinner (I don’t use the Microwave), digest, go to the gym (4x weekly or my knee will explode), play guitar, attempt to write new post or finish reviews.
2-3-4 am – Sleep.
Repeat x5 days x4 weeks x12 months x30 years. Die.
I did my best for a long time and had to beg for the raise I thought I was owed.
Motivational Epic Fail.
Tags: Fuck Work, Graphic Design, I hate my job, I'm a fraud, I'm probably going to get fired for this., Life-Wasting Pixel Pusher, MonkeyArtAwards, Office Space, White Collar Slavery
August 28th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
Cheer up! Things do get better, they really do. Working where you are working at do open many doors of opportunity. Now would be a good time to look for other opportunities because you did your time. Keep trucking along and eventually you are going to find what you want. A place that will appreciate your skills.
I wish you all the best because you are a very talented individual.
Take care
September 10th, 2008 at 9:39 am
Jesus christ you are a pussy…I have the same job and i’ve been in that situation before so I know its just you being a goddamn vagina that’s keeping you there… You ever think you just aren’t THAT GOOD and maybe that’s why your particular job is 5% creative. Get better, demand a raise whatever…if they say no…say fuck you and leave. It’s YOU and your pathetic little pea pod you call testicles that keeps you in this life not some creative director or bullshit client.
September 10th, 2008 at 10:11 am
Yeah, you’re right. I should just leave, oh wait! I have fucking rent to pay that is 3x higher than any of my friends’ HOUSE PAYMENTS! Maybe I can pull the money out of my VAGINA?!
I’m sure you know best, Dad.
You Anonymous Cunt.
September 10th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Your dad doesn’t know a vagina from a hole in the ground. That’s why I divorced him.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:17 am
Your Dad is right. If you’re any good, grow a pair and get yourself into a better situation. If not that good, well, sucks to be average, huh? And when you get down to it, that’s your problem. And really, you’re probably only average (at best) at anything you do. The industry isn’t the problem here. You and your mediocrity are. Glad I’m not a pussy.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:19 am
Your mother sounds like Edwina. She loves to bitch about her mediocrity too.
September 11th, 2008 at 2:26 am
Chapter II: The Legend of Nobody’s Gold.
Dude, I am totally Edwina and AliUptown is totally patsy. Or maybe we are just a combo of both. But my counterpart is really good at what she does. Her training was a lot better than my education.
So I’m mediocre, huh? Meh, art is subjective. Some assholes LOVE some stupid fucking designs. It’s always the dumbest one that gets chosen.
Well it could also be because I really don’t give a fuck. I took this job because I had some downtime on another job (with absolutely nothing to do with design, and it was heaven) and needed to make some money while I waited for another phase to start. I also had to escape a shitty living situation and this job payed enough to do so. So I decided to stay and pay some bills. And for a while i actually gave a shit but realized that this whole business is full of assholes like you. Oh wow, you are really good at making a piece of shit movie look watchable? Or did you design the new Dane Cook key art? Congratulations, we are all whores! Go convert this design with special features for Walmart, will ya?
I’d improve my craft but I really can’t see myself doing this shit for too much longer. What’s the payoff? I see people doing this shit for 10+ years who are actually good at it (which means nothing when some fuckhead is picking the most retard-friendly design) and we all work the same shitty hours. Nobody wins! (Except the studios and the boss) And I don’t want to own a design firm, so who cares? And what is bullshit is that there is no solidarity in this business to improve these conditions. We aren’t treated as creatives! We don’t get the same holidays off as the studios. I guess it pays to fail upwards. And did you miss the whole point of this? I’m just fucking venting here. I didn’t ASK anyone to link it. I don’t care if anyone actually reads this. I’m just doing something OTHER THAN DESIGN to erase the taste of shit from my mouth.
People who work at restaurants and shit do the same thing when they get done working, they hang out with co-workers and bitch about work. Every job has something that sucks about it. I was listing out mine.
So like I said, I don’t care if I improve as a designer. I work A-List jobs. Shit that I have done, sometimes hungover, has appeared in HUGE publications. I can walk into ANY media retailer and point to shit that was MY idea. Thats a fuck of a lot more than I expected out of the graphic design portion of my degree. My college’s DESIGN program was a joke. The ART program is what I cared about. And I’m not doing any of that now. Hell, the most I thought I would be designing was PORN or something. (Horror, same thing.) And I’d like it to be noted that I’m never applying to ANY jobs where the main focus is being a graphic design robot like now. I’d be glad to do something where design and art are a large part of it. But this office drone shit, is over. I’ll bartend or be a costume on Hollywood Blvd. before I’ll burn myself out like this again.
BTW I love that I have a place where if I don’t like what you say, I can delete it. I wont, because I give enough of a shit to reply (I was going to write something about it anyway and this is still my space), but not enough shit to censor what someone else is thinking or personally venting about on a blog. I hope you feel better by trying to attack me, but I’m not concerned about the size of my dick. Because I’m guessing that you are just venting about your own feelings of mediocrity or worse, YOUR JEALOUSY THAT EVEN THOSE OF US WHO ARE MEDIOCRE (And I totally admit it, I’m mediocre at most of the shit my autopilot brain designs) BECAUSE WHEN IT’S ALL SAID AND DONE, WE ALL WORK THE SAME HOURS, WE ARE ALL SLAVES.
Work hard for me! I’ll be sitting back until the BIG FISH designs come at me.
BTW the head of a major printer told us we do totally profesh rockin’ shit today.
I don’t even feel all of what I wrote in this blog anymore, I just had to get it out.
I still love monkeyartawards, because they know better than anyone how ridiculous this business is. I don’t totally hate the business, just the backwards way that it works.
End.
September 11th, 2008 at 9:17 am
Non illigitamus carborundum.
September 12th, 2008 at 11:11 am
please hand this guy a tampon.
September 18th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Thanks for this piece, this is exactly how I feel everytime my agent is sending me to these A-list Hollywood agencies! As a college of mine likes to call it, it’s the MINE: dark and freezing cold!
And when you’re a freelancer, they usually don’t even bother to care, they just want to press the creative juice out of your brain, most of it they won’t use anyway because they’re afraid of being really creative, and once you’re burned out…. they get another freelancer!
Oh, and the new tendency is to cut down the rates by 40%
To my opinion, the real pussies are the ones who accept to waste their lives in such environments and who pretend to be happy about it. And if you’re really happy about it, then I’m sad for you and suggest you go out and take a taste at the world.
No, wait… don’t! You’ll probably be miserable afterwards!!!
Ever noticed that happy designers do a better job in less time than unhappy designers?
Enjoy the Mine, I’m off to the beach!
September 19th, 2008 at 12:34 am
i was nodding off all week! its so cold! i put on my hoodie at 10am and feel like hibernating.
when we get freelancers in, sometimes i dont introduce myself. they could be gone the next day. its like a new friend you never get to see again.
it seems that freelancers make more…actually, it seems that WEB people make more. I couldnt do web, look at this shitty site, i hate doing web work, so technical and you don’t get to hold something in your hands when its all said and done. deleted, boom.
yes, i notice you happy designers rolling in at 10-10:30, rocking out and splitting at 6:30 if you get your comps done. i know you must be making bank, and really not much is expected of you! Usually freelances do a bomb job, but we’ve had some greenhorns come in and totally BOTCH some shit. And it all pays the same, right?
Yeah, what’s up with those drones? It’s 7:30, didn’t you get your shit done? Go home! It will be there tomorrow!
Have fun at the beach, Lola. Think of me when you make a sand castle and watch hairy barry skating down the boardwalk playing guitar!
September 23rd, 2008 at 8:26 pm
So I go to the beach, and once my head is clear and fresh I get back to the studio and finish these logos.
Three back and forth later, the client (not some executive) sends an email that says:
‘Hi Lola,
I love it. I love it. I just love it.”
Ahhhh, life is good and I love my client! Yes I’m a starving freelancer but when I do get work all my fire flows into it and I do some real design!!!
Now I wonder, is it because I have a vagina or because I treat myself with decency that the client’s happy? Uh?
Dear intr0vert, be glad, you’ve seen the light (I know, not today, but before), you’re on your way out of artificial intemperies, while some designers I know will stay all their lives in the dark coldness of Hollywood.
By the way, the real cold of real snowboarding is a fantastic alternative to the beach in winter…
Cheers!
September 23rd, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Lola will you marry me and we can be poor and happy together?
I have a cat, I hope thats ok.
-intr0vert
September 24th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Well, if you think we can also manage to still be happy if we happen to become rich – yes, some people pay for good design – then I’d love to meet your cat.
-Lola
September 25th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
That would be an adjustment, but ok, I’m in.
September 29th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Not everyone does well in entertainment design. This is not meant to be snide (although, 10 years ago I likely would have delivered it that way), just an observation. Exactly like saying not everyone does well with a poodle.
If this work doesn’t float your boat, that is no reflection upon you, except that you don’t like the work. Fair enough. Find something you do like, and do it. A much more rewarding goal, don’t cha think?
If you ascribe to the philosophy, as I do, that life is nothing but a long lesson in self-discovery, then whether or not you got the finish on “Transformers 4″ is probably not going to mean much to you in the long run. Certainly you are sharp enough to see that measuring your self-worth by the work we do is ultimately futile.
There is another side you do not see. You are a fucking amazing, fire-breathing, laser-sharp writer, with huge helpings of insight and humor. I have no idea what your design chops are like, but your writing is top notch. Do you have any idea how rare it is to be talented in two separate areas? Rejoice! Your not some dumb schmo with only one chance in life.
Also, it’s been my experience that people move up in our industry by moving over. If you’re not happy slaving where you are, a few job interviews will give you a new job title, a bit more cash (maybe a lot more), and leave you stuck with the same work. It may sound trite, but nothing says “I love you” like more cash. Discovering you “true” self-worth, and learning how to have the cajones to ask for it, are part and parcel with the job.
Just my $.02