Wednesday, March 19, 2008

My Job is Slowly Killing Me, But I Enjoy Every Minute

I love my job.

Not many people out there can honestly say this but I love it. I can't see myself happier anywhere else (except maybe if there was a position for a chief of a village full of frisky naked supermodels, still hoping to hear back from Career Builder on that one). In case y'all don't know I am a graphic designer for a sign company. I design, redesign and recreate signs for a multitude of different clients. For example today I started the day changing designs for a church, moved on to helping a coworker peal vinyl for a tech company and then designed signs for my Alma mater, a ballroom, a real estate agency, a rail trail and two different other business parks. Its amazing and every single day has this amount of variability. Tomorrow I could be doing signs for parking garages (I'm in charge of two of them, over a hundred signs each to design, cut vinyl for, and finish) or finishing a monument sign for a hospice center.

I really love the term "monument sign". I could be elsewhere designing ads for magazines and newspapers, but where else can I say that I design MONUMENTS. I mean that's some serious stuff. Those signs are going to be around for a long time (unless someone smacks them with a car or shoots the face with a shotgun, seen both already and I've only been here for a couple months) and they are usually really huge momentous things which give my ego a field day.

Another great thing about my job is the people around me. There are maybe 16 people that work for the company and every single one of them is a nice person. We celebrate every one's birthday with a food item of their choice (leftover ice cream today for the win) and everyone is always joking around and really enjoying themselves.

Also I get off at 11:30 on Fridays. During the rest of the week I work 9 hour days so Friday rolls around and I work a nice tidy little 4 and a half hour day and start my weekend.

So after reading all of this you must be asking why it is slowly killing me. Aside from the having to be at work at 7, which I don't think I will ever get used to, its hellish jobs like the one this afternoon. From the beginning I thought to myself that this job will be a nightmare. Only been with the company for several months but I'm starting to see them coming. This job if you would look at it would seem like nothing at all, like something we could knock out in a half a day including fabrication. But then there's the hundred hidden things. The sign is so big that I had to find a way to cut it into two pieces on the screen. The client wants the one letter to go into the border so I have to find a way to cut away the bottom of the letter without disrupting the outline of the letter's shape. And the computers are BAT SHIT CRAZY. They seriously have a mind of their own, in which one of the words works perfectly fine and the other word acts like it doesn't exist. I switch and redo for hours, my computer decides its going to stop working so I have to redo the whole process again and the word still doesn't work the way it should. The router operator is telling me about how I will have to stand in a sand blast booth where the sand shoots so fast the deflection ricochets back and rips the skin off your body if we can't figure this out and at the same time a man from the school district stops by to order six more of the pain in the butt three layer signs that they love so much.........

But at least there was a break for ice cream.

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