The Curse of the iPhone

I love my iPhone, but there is a problem and it is growing exponentially.

Not with the technology, but with the morons who use it.

This is increasingly what I deal with:  I do a job.  I email in the final file.  Within hours I receive a hearty "Looks Great! Thanks!" from the client.  Days or weeks later comes the angry email... "What is this?  This isn't what I approved!  It's totally different!"

I don't know what they think happened.  Do they think I snuck into their office and swapped out the file like it was Folger's Crystals?

By now I know the drill, so the first thing I ask is...

...Did you approve this on your iPhone?

And the answer is always yes.  It was approved after looking at it on a 3 inch iPhone screen.  While driving.

What the iPhone has done is it has unshackled stupidity.  No longer do you have to be content being incompetent from a corner office, you now have the freedom to be incompetent on the go.

This was a particular problem with the last job.  Typically, once I had finished a job it went to our proofreader.  We actually had a full-time, dedicated employee who's sole job was to proof all the copy on every job.  Her name was Dorothy.  Within hours, Dorothy would email in her A-OK and the job would go off to the client, and within hours of that, the client would shoot off an angry email pointing out all the typos.  But that wasn't Dorothy's fault.  Dorothy was a busy girl.  Dorothy was rarely in the office.  Dorothy was doing her job on an iPhone.  As you can probably imagine, when you proof page after page of 9 point type on an iPhone, things get missed.  Dorothy couldn't be expected to catch things on an iPhone could she?  That would be silly.  So it was my fault.

Which brings me to this morning.  I had designed a logo for a sporting wear company.  The owner emailed me on Wednesday asking for a minor change and asked me to re-send the files.  I did so immediately.  This morning I received a text...

"You never sent me the files I requested on Wednesday."

But, in fact, I had.  I found them in my "sent" file.  I texted him back and said that I did in fact send them but that I would send them again.  And I did.  Fifteen minutes later I texted him again, asking if he had received the files this time.

"No."

We tried again.  Again he said he didn't receive them.

Finally, I did the unthinkably retrograde thing.  I called him.

"So you didn't receive any of the files?  I've sent them three times.  Are you getting any email from me?" I asked.

"Well" he said, "I do receive email from you, but they take too long to download on my phone so I just delete them."

I took a minute and counted to ten.  I explained that the emails he was deleting were in fact the files he requested.  The reason they were taking a long time to download was because they were, you know, his JOB.  They were image files.  They were big.

"Oh" he said.  "I don't have Wifi.  Can you send them faster?"

Oy vey.

I told him I would reduce the file size but that it would lower the resolution and might be hard to make out on a iPhone screen.  He said OK and so I did it.

He emailed back.

"These look fuzzy.  Make them bigger."

I get the impression I will be on this Merry-Go-Round all day.

Work For Hire

You would think by now I would be used to this, being unemployed.  By my reckoning this makes six times in the last fours years.  First, after I was downsized out of my long-time agency job in 2008.  And again, six months later at the next agency.  Then followed nine scary months with no prospects whatsoever as we drained our savings and my 401k until out of desperation more than anything else, I took the job in Shitsville.  That agency folded like a cheap card table five months after we moved there.  There was the brief stint at a real estate firm before the owner decided his wife's cousin's son-in-law could do the job cheaper.  He was 18.  Then there was the magazine that went belly-up after two issues and finally the most recent fiasco in the fast paced, psychotic world of online social media.

I'm beginning to think my job is actually being jobless.  Without any benefits of course.  Every time I'm able to panhandle some freelance work, the government declares me Fully Employed! and of no need of assistance.  I've lost track of how many jobs I've applied for online.  It has to be over a thousand by now.  I stopped keeping count somewhere back in the 700's and that was in 2010.  My experience has been that every time you fill one out and hit "send" it just goes down the memory hole.  In four years I had never received a reply to a job application.

Until last week.

I had found a job posting online for a cable channel.  I can't say which one because the industry is small and people talk.  Suffice it to say it's core demographic is shut-ins with cats.  I had filled out the online application but didn't expect anything to come of it since nothing had come of any in the past.  So imagine my surprise when I was contacted a few days later and told the V.P. wanted to meet with me.  The interview was set up for yesterday.

I was so thrilled just to get an interview out of the deal I didn't really even care that it was for a channel I wouldn't be caught dead watching.  Somehow or other, if it came to that, I would make it work.  Once again, I was desperate.


So yesterday I schlepped to the San Fernando Valley. If anything, the logistics of getting the job would be worse than the last one, but at that point I figured we'd worry about that later, if the time came.

Initially I met with the H.R, director, a squat little man.  He ushered me into his office and asked if it was OK if he asked some questions and noted the answers. What was I going to say, "No"?  The first question was... "Name your three worst personnel conflicts at past jobs."

Are you fucking kidding?  Who the hell would answer that?  "Well, there was that one time when I beat my boss senseless with a coffee mug..."  I've had my share of office conflicts, but none I was going to share with this little Oompa Loompa.  I demurred and said none came to mind.  He continued... "We'll, if you did have a personal conflict in the office, what steps would you take to prevent it from escalating into anything violent?"

Was there some history of violence at the company which I should know about?

Mercifully, the V.P. I was to meet with buzzed him and said she was ready for me.

Jessica was her name.  She was a big girl with shoulder length dirty hair.  She was wearing a periwinkle sweater with food stains on it and a khaki skirt that hadn't seen an iron in years.  Here office looked like the home of a hoarder.  She was, I thought, the prototypical viewer of her network.  We exchanged some pleasantries and I scanned her office to get a sense of who she was.  Usually, in an interview with a creative director, I check the book case to get a sense of their aesthetic but Jessica's bookshelves were full of books on food. Specifically, dessert.

"30 Minute Cakes."

"30 Minute Pies."

"Rachel Ray Desserts."

"Microwave Baking."

Clearly, Jessica had a sweet tooth and time management issues.

She started to leaf through my portfolio, casually, thoughtlessly, as if it was a three month old issue of People in a doctor's office.  After about a dozen pages she looked at me and said...

"Your work is very clever and conceptual.  We don't do that here."

And that was the high point of the interview.

It was a long, sad, angry drive home.  I'm just getting too old for this shit.

El Jefe Grande

You live with someone ten years you think you know them.  Then something happens that is so shocking you find yourself wondering whether you really know them at all.

We were addressing some much deferred maintinence at our little cabin in the woods.  The ancient pine trees in the front yard had grown into the power lines and when the winter snows came, the limbs would be so weighted down that they stretched the lines to near snapping.  I swore I would take care of it in the Spring, and then the Summer, but I always ended up putting it off.  But now, with Fall in the air and snow on the way (perhaps as early as this week!) there was an urgency to addressing the issue.

I contracted with some local tree trimmers on the mountain and the plan was for them to arrive "mid morning" on Saturday.  "Mid morning" for them ended up being 8:30 am.  The foreman, the man I had met with the week prior, was a burly looking white guy in his 40's.  He showed up in a pick-up, trailed by another another truck with a two man crew and a massive arsenal of chainsaws.  I looked at the chainsaws and thought of the boyfriend, peacefully sleeping upstairs and realized immediately this wouldn't end well.

I spoke to the foreman and stressed how conservative I wanted to be.  I wanted the trees left as natural as possible while yet clearing the power lines.  We spoke of being "surgical" and "judicious" and "thoughtful".  He claimed to understand what I wanted and promised that they cared deeply for the trees.  He then gave his marching orders to the crew, in Spanish, and hopped in his truck, off to another job somewhere on the mountain.

I went inside to get a cup of coffee and heard the first chainsaw rip into action.  And looked up fearfully at the ceiling.

Didn't take long.  Within a few seconds I heard the boyfriend jump out of bed and go stomping along the ceiling to the stairs.  He stormed downstairs, he was not happy.  I swore to him I had no control over it, that they said they were coming later, that there was nothing I could do.  He poured himself a cup of coffee, slowly waking up and calming down.  Together we walked out onto the deck.

And saw the carnage.

It's amazing how quickly you can wreck havoc with just a chainsaw.  They hadn't been at in more than a couple of minutes and already the largest, oldest pine was missing four of it's largest limbs.  It looked like a quadriplegic.

I was shocked, to say the least, and then I looked at the boyfriend, face as red as a tomato, the look of hate in his eyes.

And then it happened.

"¿Qué estás haciendo? Usted está masacrando mis árboles! ¡Basta ya! ¡Basta ya! ¿Dónde está el gran jefe? Tengo que hablar con el gran jefe inmediato. No toque otra rama. Soy furous!"

I was stunned.

The boyfriend speaks Spanish?

Where the fuck did that come from?

In ten years, the only time I've heard him speak Spanish was at a Mexican restaurant, and even then he sounded like a white boy.  Where the hell were these bi-lingual skills when we truly needed them?  Like all the years we suffered through Teresa the lazy housekeeper?

I turned to the boyfriend, gobsmacked.

He looked at me sheepishly.  "It's just something I picked up back when I worked in food service."

It was too late to save our one pine tree, but el Jefe Grande returned in time to sort our aesthetic issues and the other two trees were spared the barbaric trimming of the first.  Hopefully the damage isn't life threatening to the poor tree, which has to be at least a hundred years old.

So now I find myself wondering is I really know the boyfriend at all.  What other surprises await?  Will he break into Mandarin the next time we order Chinese?  Or are his secrets deeper, darker.  I guess only time will tell.

Or, as the boyfriend might say, "sólo el tiempo lo dirá."