i don't often go into detail about my work projects, because it's insanely boring to anyone who's not a designer. which is most of the planet. but let me give you all an example of just 30 minutes in my daily life:
some of you regular readers might remember i've mentioned that there are a couple of hundred things that can go wrong when printing a job. i forget the exact number, but it's something like 340. every week at the office's status meeting, we all catch up on each other's projects, the theory being that we all have a rough idea of what's happening that week with the 150+ jobs our office handles a week on average.
today during the meeting, i got a call from client X, asking where her job that was supposed to deliver on friday was. i told her i'd check and get back to her. i asked the office, 'so, did job X deliver on friday?' and got a bunch of confused looks. so i call the printer to see if they delivered it. the driver remembered one of the fledglings signing for it, but oddly, we have no paperwork on job X. hrm.
so we start scouring our office, our storage garage, and our files, trying to find either the job or the paperwork on the job. nothing. i suspect that job X, being a very small run, probably only took up a single box, and somehow got mixed in with one of the five other jobs that printer delivered on friday. we start calling every client who came and picked up one of the other four jobs on friday, asking them to go through their boxes and check for an extra. it's understandable, as most people have NO idea how many boxes 1400 pieces that are 17 x 11" flat, folded to 8.5 x 11" on 85# book go into -- and why would they? (it takes one box, btw.)
we wait while clients check their offices. i wonder loudly why no one bothered to sign the boxes in on the inventory sheet and make the clients sign for each of their jobs, which is what is supposed to happen. people look embarrassed and examine the carpet.
we finally get a phone call from client Y saying they found it in their office. a fledgling is dispatched to client Y's office to pick up job X and take it to client X. i call client X and apologize profusely and explain the mistake client Y made.
then, i got a phone call from client X. after she called me, she'd had to go to a meeting with client Y, and client Y said to her, 'oh, i've got your job!' why client Y couldn't have told either us or client X on friday mystifies me. why the paperwork for job X didn't come with the job and got handed to me only a few seconds ago also mystifies me.
sigh.
and that's just *one* job. this week, our office is handling 154 jobs, which will shortly change to 162 after i write up the new jobs clients decided to call or email me about. before i leave this job, i'll have to make sure all my current jobs are well-documented, so someone can pick up where i left off. that's not too much of a problem, because i'm pretty good at documenting as i go.
no, the real pain is going to be doing the brain-dump of all the non-official jobs. and of all the IT stuff. and of all the small things i have picked up over 10 YEARS. and then packing up my office. feh.