I have been hard pressed to find time to post to the MB recently as work has me busier than a Wall Street coke dealer in 1988. While working for a small company is a better place for me to exist professionally, socially and creatively, it also has its drawbacks. Like accountability and less free time to surf the internet for a directory of bare celebrity crotch shots. Last week's addition of a young, fire-balling web designer to the team should alleviate the current production logjam resulting in me getting home at a reasonable hour to conjure up a semi-witty post.

Labels: apathy, career

• Until the Intern becomes a full-time employee he shall be called a different female name every time he is addressed or is brought up in conversation.
  
• When the Intern comes strolling into the office all cocky with Starbucks in hand, he will be directed back out the door to fetch the Art Director a pumpkin spiced latte.
• When eating sandwiches in the conference room and the real employees want to talk about something important, the Intern will be directed to the vending machines in the building across the parking lot to fetch the CEO a Mountain Dew.
  
• When being instructed to "tighten" up a design and the Intern sarcastically quips, "How tight do you want it?" The following exchange will take place:
  "Tighter than a 13-year old Romanian gymnasts ass."
  "That is tight."
  "Fucking A right it is, Susie."

Labels: career, taxi dev

In case you have not noticed by the recent minimal posting, these past few months have been a blur of work and liquor. I have been pulling some long hours in order to catch our production schedule up to an acceptable level as well as drinking at a frat boy pace during an autumn social (a charity golf tournament this past Saturday had me knocking back Bloody Mary's at seven in the morning). Tonight our office park held an "official" open house rife with free hooch, gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches and pulled pork fajitas. We got the chance to chat up our neighbors who are mostly architects, photographers, creative types, tech junkies and one drug addict painter contracted to complete odd jobs until the end of the year. As I post this I am draining a glass of scotch and researching how to create a typing text effect in Flash. Welcome to my OCPD.

Labels: career, denver, liquor, taxi dev

1. Getting sent three emails for the same subject. The first email contains instructions that always refer to a missing attachment, the second email contains the attachment they forgot to attach in the first email and the third email contains another "final" attachment and instructions to disregard all previous emails.
2. Being invited to an all day WebEx meeting so I can "be observed" while I complete the site design. There is still twelve hours of work left to do.
3. Being told that an terrible stock image of two black people, an exotic looking female and a douchebag boy-band looking white guy was not "diverse enough."
4. Getting berated for development delays even though the client did not return emails or phone calls for three months.
5. Being told that "You are the artist. Surprise me!" immediately after being told, "I don't like surprises."

Labels: career

Tomorrow I start the new gig and I am wetter than a mating walrus with excitement. Much of my elation stems from the fact that my office is located in the titty-licous TAXI By Zeppelin Development. If Grandpa Broz were alive today he would be proud that I was bringing the Brozovich name back down to Globeville (from the 1930s through the 1970s, Globeville was the capitol of the Denver Slavic community and home to any handle ending in "vich" or "czk"). Being as my Great Uncle Al and Aunt Tillie still live in the old 'hood, I might just have to hit them up for a sandwich and a WWII or rail yard story one day for lunch.

Labels: career, denver, taxi dev

Friday, June 29. My daunting three-day trial on the unemployment line ended when I was offered an Art Director position immediately after a two-hour interview. I accepted the offer and start this Friday. The people seem great and of the non-douchebag variety, the pay is solid and my skill set should grow exponentially. That night our neighbors extended an impromptu invite "for a drink" over the fence. We ended up staying for six hours, helped drink their cooler dry, gorged ourselves on barbeque spare ribs and watched their 13-year-old daughter's recent European vacation slides.

Saturday, June 30. With the wives at a baby shower talking about their uteruses, I stuffed an amazing basket of fish and chips down my cake chute and drained numerous Coors Light pitchers at Clancys with CH, Tyler and Fateh. Aside from the poor patio location and a bad wait staff that included a red-haired meth skank that kept forgetting our orders and a chubby blond girl with a giant snake tattoo, good times were had by all. That night we ate a late sushi dinner and took in 1408 with Team Sutton. It was refreshing to watch a movie in a theater since we have not done so since the Korean War.

Sunday, July 1. The wife and I celebrated our one-year anniversary. We walked around our deserted wedding venue in the 100-degree heat sipping on blended coffee drinks, ate heaping plates of steamed mussels and took in back-to-back movies thanks to my criminal wife who snuck me into Ratatouille in the confusion of the exiting Rise Of The Silver Surfer crowd. It was refreshing to watch movies in a theater since we have not done so since Saturday, June 30, 2007.

Labels: career, drinking, sg crew, unemployment, weekend that was, wife

Yesterday I lost my job. The company founders called me into the office and broke the happy news. They brought up the following reasons for my termination:

• I came in late three times in past two months.
• I was expected to work more than eight hours every day.
• They felt they had to coddle me through their company policies and procedures.
• They had no confidence in me as a designer.

I addressed these points as follows:

• I was late three times but it was never more than ten minutes each time and I stayed well past 5:00 whenever this occurred. You would have known this if you did not leave at 5:15 everyday.
• If I had known the job required me to pull ten hour days (which I was never told) I would have not accepted it in the first place.
• I was never given any briefing on company policies, expectations or any formal or informal training. I recall my first day (which neither one of you even offered to take me to lunch on), I was thrust in front of a computer and told to, "Be an Art Director."
• I spent the past two months editing files and websites other people developed. I produced one original design. You hated it. The client loved it. Is that not how a designer measures success?

The corporate culture over at Gas Sack, Inc. (my new pet name for that fuck circus) was more oppressive than a concentration camp. Granted, nobody was getting shoved into an oven, but I have never witnessed employees operating under such intense fear; fear of making a mistake, fear of failure, fear of good design. I can recall only two times when I heard people laughing in the office. Two times. In two months. And both times the founders were gone for the day. The art on the walls even sucked. Oil maps of Texas, Arkansas, New Mexico and this. Which is appropriate for a homosexual ski lodge but not so much for an Investor Relations consulting firm.

So now I am back to firing off resumes (seven today), eating ketchup sandwiches and watching Judge Joe Brown and my wife is back to questioning why she married such an unemployable sack of shit.

Labels: career, unemployment

I am enjoying the new job and the downtown scene. Within a block of the office there are five coffee shops, four sandwich joints, a Chipotle, a flower vendor, a blind bum that likes to sing Isley Brothers tunes and the always lively 16th Street Mall. The mall is usually teaming with business executives connected to their ear piece cell phones like Lobot, statuesque women in six inch heels walking with mean swaggers, homeless panhandlers and disheveled, mentally ill crazies that yell and carry signs. The latter are by far the most entertaining. Yesterday a wild-eyed maniac sporting a wig that looked like a dumpster diving reward was walking down the mall with a sign that read "GESUS LOVES U." He nearly got ran over by a shuttle bus as he was thrusting said sign into the faces of a nice looking gentleman and his two younger daughters who were participating in Bring Your Child To Work Day. This morning as I was looping around the building to the parking garage, a filthy drug addict was flashing a two-way sign on the corner which read "HILLARY IS FIDEL" on one side and "JFK SHOT MARILYN" on the other. It was comforting to learn that even homeless drug addicts hate Hillary.

Labels: 16th street mall, career, denver, downtown

As I stare down the barrel of my new gig, I wax poetically at St. Mark's Uptown, two beers into the evening, going over existing projects with my soon-to-be former boss:

You killed the pants-free dream for me. I don't think it was intentional, but then again, my ex-girlfriend's observation of my inability to display emotion wasn't expressed to break us up but it broke us up nonetheless. Looming over me everyday was the "option" to throw my laptop in my bag and patronize some outdoor cafe with free WiFi and a young barista with firm breasts to serve me hot caffeinated drinks. Actual times I exercised this "option": zero. Looming over me everyday was the "option" to delegate work to competent contractors while I enjoyed an afternoon skiing down a powder filled slope or taking a lazy nap on the grass at a local park. Actual times I attempted to delegate work to contractors only to have the project blow up in my face and spend late nights correcting mistakes only amateurs make: too numerous to count. I spent my tenure working sixty hours weeks and cursing at my brand new iMac while my cute wife made muffins and brought me beers in the hopes I would cease yelling, "You filthy bitch!" at poorly coded sites. I was haunted by phone calls from clients whose projects were fucked before I came along and will stay fucked long after I am gone. Lesson learned. I need a place where I can leave incompetent contractors, pissed off clients with unrealistic deadlines and an apathetic boss. That place is called "the office" and not "home."

Labels: career, pants-free

The working from home experiment officially ends on April 24 as I have accepted an Art Director position for a consulting firm in downtown Denver for a ridiculous amount of money. I learned many things during the home office endeavor:

• When not physically interacting with society on a regular basis I will not change my shorts until I squat down to pick something up and smell the essence of my own ass.
• When not physically interacting with society on a regular basis I will not shower until I squat down to pick something up and smell the essence of my own ass.
• When Divorce Court is on I will not turn it off. Preach on, Judge Toler. Preach on.
• There are times in life when porn is your enemy.
• I do not hate society as much as once initially thought.
• Conference calls are just as worthless as face to face meetings.
• Clients cannot tell when you are calling them from the bathroom.
• Clients cannot tell when you are surfing your RSS feeds instead of taking notes.
• Clients will not take you seriously if your "team" consists of anyone from India or the Philippines.
• Total hours (per week) put in at an office job during a normal work week: 42. Total hours (per week) put in at a home office job during a normal work week: 55.
• Working from home is a lot like bedding a really hot girl and then finding out that she is a lousy lay; at first you cannot believe its happening to you and then you realize its just a means to an end.

Labels: career, pants-free

Today, in the midst of Hanukkah Blizzard, I accepted a Creative Director position with a small design firm in Denver. I will be able to maintain the pants-free lifestyle I have grown accustomed over these past months, as my office will be in my home. I will occasionally venture out for a cup of coffee or a sandwich and maintain connectivity with the world via all form of modern technological accouterment (cell phone, computer, IM, email, carrier pigeon). Other than that, society is officially dead to me. This career path is free of company-wide circle jerks with CEOs who receive Xmas cards from unemployed designers that lie about profits, revenues and layoffs. Once the roads are deemed safe by the governor again, I will be rolling up to the Apple Store to drop some coin on a new iMac and MacBook. Final unemployment statistics: 101 resumes sent and nine interviews all spanning three months, one week and one day.

Labels: blizzard, career, colorado, pants-free, snow, unemployment

Even if I had days to reflect on a metaphor to describe my current career situation it would not be any better than this. Adrift in a small, fiberglass boat in the middle of the ocean with people that do not speak English and subsisting on nothing but rainwater, raw fish and seabirds with only the Bible to read? Yeah, that sounds about right.

Labels: career, data slaughterhouse

Portland, Oregon is a gorgeous city resting on the banks of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers. If the future wife and I were looking to move there, I am certain I could find work with the local police department as a sketch artist.

Labels: career, tomfoolery, wife

I am in the midst of contemplating some major career decisions. These past six months have been the worst of my professional life and that includes my first year out of college when I was laid off twice and commuting fifty miles daily in a car with no air conditioning. Needless to say, I have been sending out resumes with the subtlety of a self-immolating Buddhist monk. I have started a morning ritual of meditating in my car before I go into the office to put myself in the right frame of mind. The ritual goes as such: I take a deep breath and think about starving children in Africa whose villages are torn apart by famine, disease and death. I take a deep breath and think about young female amputees scared for life by land mines and the memories of having sex with zealot soldiers consumed with hate just to survive a civil war. I take a deep breath and think about heroin addicts living on the streets who were born into unloving, drug infested homes where they were physically, sexually and/or mentally abused. Then I call myself a pussy, put my experience in perspective, sack up and go into the office dreaming of the day when I will finally get rid of that fucking car without air conditioning. Recent developments have me hopeful this will happen very soon. Now on to more important things; like Eastern European broads wrestling in their panties. Spoiler: The match is decided when the brunette puts the blond in a nasty head-scissor lock.

Labels: career, perversion