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."

The Sound of Silence

The first time I saw this apartment was the day we moved in.  Circumstances were such that once the boyfriend found it, there wasn't time for me to drive down from Bumfuck to check it out, so I had to give my blessing based only on the images online.  I didn't know at the time about the dollhouse proportions, but there was one thing that gave me pause... It was located across the street from a high school.

It wasn't so much the traffic and noise I was concerned about.  It was...

Band.

More specifically, Marching Band.

I know of what I speak having spent fours years blaring a trumpet in one myself.  I remember the early morning practices, and evenings and weekends too.  I remember the constant repetition of badly arranged pop tunes, over and over and over again.  I had visions of being blasted awake by "Call Me Maybe" all in brass.

We moved here in March, well past the football season.  Last month as I saw the high school gearing up for the new year I girded for the worst.

And then... nothing.

School has been in session for weeks now, and yet, no band.

I know they have one.  There's a ginormous fifth wheel trailer emblazoned with the band insignia parked across the street.

Maybe they practice elsewhere?  That would explain the trailer but seems like a logistical nightmare.  Not to mention a not particularly wise use of tax dollars.

And then, yesterday morning, I was walking the dogs.  We were taking our time since I had nowhere to be and nothing to do, other than look for work.  And as we descended down the hill towards the street and school, I saw a half dozen golden Sousaphone bells gliding silently over the fence of the athletic field.  Looking closer, through an open gate, I could see the entire band, instruments raised, flanked by flag girls and rifle twirlers, all performing  intricate looking formations.

In silence.

I strained to hear and could just barely make out the sound of one snare drum, quietly banging out a staccato cadence, marking time.

WTF?

"Silent Marching Band"?  How the hell does that work?  I wouldn't think that would make for a memorable half-time show.

Do they just lip-synch?  Maybe the times have changes and they just march around with prop instruments to pre-recorded tracks?  If so, then I think we owe a collective apology to the surviving half of Milli Vanilli.

On further reflection it occurred to me that this has got to be one of the quietest high schools in the world.  You never hear anything.  No bells, no announcements, no pep rallies, no nothing.

If I had to guess I'd probably blame it on the neighbors.  I think it's a case of NIMBY-ism run amuck.  They move right next door to a high school and them raise a stink about the noise... of a high school.  Probably threaten to sue every time they hear a glockenspiel.

Even I have to admit that's kind of sad.

Not that I'm complaining

Women and Children First

And so it ends, my so-called job.  Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Honestly, the writing was on the wall months ago.  Things had grown so bitter that the only question was whether it would end by being fired or with a nasty resignation.  In the end, it came down to the root of all evil... money.  As in, there wasn't any.

I'd actually worked for the company for over a year as a freelance consultant, back when it was a fly-by-night virtual operation.  It was already a somewhat fraught relationship when it ended up being purchased in March (for between $5 and $10 MILLION, if one is to believe the New York Times, and really, why wouldn't one?) by a multinational holding company.  With it came an infusion of cash and an offer for a full-time job.

The first problem was the matter of logistics.  Our new corporate overlords insisted the high flying company be grounded, and grounded in office space they already leased in a nearly inaccessible corner of West L.A.  A full-time job would require four hours a day stuck in traffic.

The second, and more concerning problem was the salary, which was laughably low.  It actually would've been a pay cut.  "But you'll have major medical" my boss protested.  Yes, and a $1000 gas bill each month.

We struck a compromise.

I would sign a short term contract for three months.  By that time the company would be am internet sensation and the cash would be rolling in and then they could offer a more big boy salary.

Never happened.

And I can't say I'm surprised.  One of my chief functions was creating the new business pitches and over the past three months I had done dozens of them.  Not a single one led to any new work.   And after watching my boss in action during one of the pitch meetings a couple of weeks ago, the reason why became clear...

My boss was a dick.

Arrogant, condescending and a pants-on-fire liar.  It was a huckster performance of epic proportions. If I was a potential client, I wouldn't let him park my car, let alone have access to my advertising budget.  We still had some existing clients, but there was no way those billings could cover the vastly increased overhead.  And so, with the money running low,  the decision was made to just let my contract expire.  The decision had been made that my position was expendable, at least until last week when they suddenly seemed to realize what it was I actually did.  That resulted in one final week-long flurry of stupidity, which is why I was missing in action from the blog.

I'm actually a little relieved.  I feel like I got the first lifeboat off the Costa Concordia (Titanic references are so 20th Century).  All the same, it's a little scary be unemployed.  Again.

Once more into the breach...

Park Place

Little did we know when we moved here we'd have to pay for parking.

Not technically.  We have a two car garage.  The only problem is it currently only fits one car.

While we downsized our lives moving here to Tinytown, we weren't able to downsize our stuff.  We tried, selling off whole rooms of furniture before the move.  And yet, it wasn't enough.  As the movers pulled away and we barely had room to move about the condo, the garage was still half full of boxes.  We assumed this would be a temporary situation.

Over the past six months, we've tried to clear out the garage, to the point that every square inch of the condo now resembles a Russian nesting doll, with things within things within things.  Still, not enough.

Initially I parked nearby in "guest parking".  After a few days of that I walked out to my car to find a parking ticket.  Not a real one.  A ticket from the rent-a-cop who patrols the complex after hours, the man who has become my arch-nemesis...

"Officer Jacobson".

After the first ticket I wrote a very nice note, explaining that we had just moved in and were trying to rectify the situation and left it under my windshield wiper.  The next day I walked up to the car and saw another ticket.  Again from Officer Jacobson.  Only this time he had violently circled the portion saying that after three tickets the car would be towed.

And so began a game of cat-and-mouse with me and Officer Jacobson.  I'd park in guest parking for a day or two until I received another ticket and then went and parked my car on the street for a few days.  Which is a pain in the ass.  The nearest street parking is blocks away.  After giving Officer Jacobson a few days to cool off, I'd resume parking in guest parking and we'd start another round.

Until last month.

I had only parked in guest parking for one night when I went out and discovered my car was gone.

Towed.

By Officer Jacobson.

Without even giving me the customary fake ticket.  Asshole.

It cost $286 to get my car back and another $40 for the cab ride to the tow yard.  Cabs in OC are worse than New York!

Since then I've decided not to take any more chances with Officer Jacobson.  I've been parking on the street now for weeks and schlepping everything clear across the complex.  The only problem now is I'm still getting tickets.

And these ones are real!

Really...."street sweeping"?  I got my third one last week.  At $40 a pop.  For some reason I've got a mental block when it comes to Tuesday street sweeping.

I finally figured out a solution.  I usually have lunch at least once a week with my folks so I've just scheduled it now for Tuesdays to make sure I get my car off the street.  The only problem is I need to park the car in guest parking until 5, when "street sweeping" officially ends.  I'm afraid if I forget I'm parked there, I'll walk out the next morning to discover Officer Jacobson has struck again.

At this rate, parking is going to cost me $1000 a year.

Medium Rare

The boyfriend and I have become fans of the "Long Island Medium",  the suburban New York woman who talks to the dead.

I wonder if she could contact my career?

It's apparently "crossed over" and I have a few questions.