Printers = Satan**

Printers are direct descendants of the devil.  They will always win no matter what, and there isn't a damn thing you can do to change that.

I've been doing battle all year with a particular printer at the photo lab I frequent, and recently, this printer has decided that instead of at least pretending to cooperate with me, it was just going to make me absolutely miserable.  Every time I walk in, it greets me quite amicably -- enough to trick me into thinking that perhaps this time, it will do my bidding.

So I delicately load a piece of paper into its tray and press the print button.  Then all hell breaks loose. 

Of course, once the data has been sent through, the paper can't be salvaged, so letting it go and hoping for the best is usually the most logical option.  If nothing else, when the results are less than desirable, the problem can be easily diagnosed.  If a head cleaning is needed, for example, that's easily identifiable and simple to fix.

Or at least, it should be on any other printer.  Except this one.  Because this one is the Anti-Christ.

I'll admit, I'm not the most patient of people, but I try to remain level-headed when a big project is on the line, as frustration is often counter-productive and won't do anything in the way of helping me achieve the desired results.  But it's around this time that my patience starts wearing thin.  And the printer knows it.  And oh, it LOVES it.

...And then, this happens.

Which is great when you've stolen your office printer to dismantle in a deserted field.  Unfortunately, it's not so great when you still have jobs queued.

Well, fuck.


**This post is dedicated in part to my dear friend Stuart, who has denied all knowledge of my existence purely for the sake of getting printers to cooperate with me.  (If you like music, particularly funk and blues, or if you're an analogue junkie, or if you just want to read the musings of a relatively cool Aussi, you should show him some love by checking him out at  www.somethingaboutfunk.wordpress.com.)  The rest of this post is dedicated to a lovely woman named Bonnie who has jumped through circus-worthy hoops on multiple occasions in attempts to make the printer in question my bitch.

I'm a Real Artist Now!

Internships are great.  They give you opportunities to explore your future career path of choice, and they hook you up with loads of people who can help you along the way.  What they don't do, however, is pay you.  So although I've got a pretty sweet gig lined up for the spring, I need a paying job.  Because, like most relatively functional people, I've got expenses.

**

**If we want to be technical about it, I'm not so sure that Boy counts as a real expense.  It would just be really nice to have to funds to treat him to a proper dinner out and such every so often.  And if we want to get even more technical, there is no flight to Portland booked at this time because I'm broke.

But that will all change soon, as I start a seasonal job tomorrow as an artist for an online ornament company!

I went to their office for an interview last week, all gung-ho and excited.  When I walked in the door, though, the first thing I noticed was how perfectly miserable every single employee looked.  Maybe it was the pre-Thanksgiving Christmas music droning on in the background, or maybe it was the overzealous middle-aged women walking around like overseers, pointing out several mistakes the Packers and Shippers were making in taping boxes together.  Trying to be optimistic, I decided that maybe I just didn't understand the specific situation at hand, so I took a seat by the receptionist's desk to wait for my interview with Loraine.  It was then that I saw this sign hanging by the door:

Did I say "overzealous"?

After about 10 minutes, Loraine came out to meet me.  Or rather, I assumed she was Loraine.  She never once introduced herself during the entirety of the interview.  Nor did she ask my name until about halfway through.

"So, your name is Kate, right?"

"Um, no, I'm Kimber."

"That's right.  I'm sorry.  Kim, Kate, it all sounds the same."

"I understand --"

"So you prefer Kim, then?"

"Um, Kimber, actually."

"Great!  Well, Kim, you don't happen to have a steady hand and excellent handwriting, do you?"

After restarting my brain, I managed a quick, "I think so."

"Well that's great!  We need more artists!"  Loraine replied.  "Why don't you have a seat here and we'll give you the test!"

"Ok, I can do this," I told her.  "I've decorated ornaments with my family for years!"

"Well, why didn't you say so, honey?!  We would've had you in here weeks ago!  We need more artists!"

I decided it probably wasn't worth the effort to mention that I had written exactly that in my cover letter.  Which was required in the application.

At any rate, when she said "artist," I thought maybe I'd have a chance to paint the ornaments, which would be super fun.  I was wrong.  As Loraine sat me down and laid several ornaments out in front of me, I realized that the position of artist actually just meant writing customers' names (and maybe a special message) neatly onto cheaply decorated, mass-ordered ornaments made in China.  But the trick to it, Loraine explained, was that you had to make sure that the text didn't overwhelm the artistic value of the ornament.  The original design's integrity had to remain intact.  Though we were allowed to put little flourishes around the names, which would be left up to the artist's discretion.  For example:

"Are there any specific names I should write on these?" I asked Loraine.

"Nope, your favorite names will work just fine," she said, walking away.


I set to work, writing ornaments for my housemates and my neighbors.  Once finished, I was feeling strangely proud of my handwriting, and I went to find Loraine, who in turn went to find the owner and president of the company, Mary.  Mary took a long, hard look at my samples, eventually deeming them acceptable.  But, she pointed out, I would need some training.  Apparently, the large space at the bottom of one of the ornaments that was clearly meant to be completely filled with text was not actually meant to be completely filled with text.

"But that's ok," Mary reassured me.  She then grabbed a box of defective ornaments and began sorting through them so that I could have a take-home practice kit.  She instructed me to go on the company's website to use those designs as templates.  As she carefully scrutinized each piece, she tried to strike up a friendly conversation with me, asking if I went to school.  I told her that I had recently graduated.  She asked from where, so I told her.  This surprised (and apparently impressed) her, and she didn't hesitate to make that fact known.  In front of a room full of employees.

Ornaments in hand, I booked it out of there before anyone could have a long enough look at my face to recognize me on my first day, for which I was given a starting time, but not an ending time.  I asked, and the reply was, "Let's just see how it goes."  Right.  Nor was I told what my hourly wage would be, come to think of it.


I drove home and got started right away on my assignment so that I wouldn't forget about it.  I browsed through the company's site, and holy shit, their stuff was awful!  It reminded me of the ornaments CVS used to give out for free if you spent a certain amount on Christmas decor.  Once the initial wave of nausea passed, I sat there pondering what kind of people would actually order these things.  And at $15.00 a pop?!

But a job is a job, and I'm not going to complain, so I sat down and began writing, figuring that at the very least, I could use this pile as gag Christmas gifts for my housemates, neighbors, and boy.

I still felt like maybe I wasn't preserving the natural integrity of the ornament's original design, so I went back on the site.  Finally, it occurred to me that maybe the text should just match the cheesiness of the ornament.  And yep, that was it.

Though I'm not sure my sanity will be as well preserved.

The Mixdown

You know those people who, when you first meet them seem pretty awesome, but once you get to know them better, you realize that they're just a bottomless bucket of fail?  My best friend is currently being wooed by one of them.  Disregarding the fact that my friend is very anti-hipster and this kid's photo would be found under urbandictionary.com's definition of the word, he's also a DJ of sorts.  Strictly speaking, there is nothing wrong with being a DJ, and being a good DJ might even rank one about 3/4's the way up the Ultimate Scale of Badass, but this kid is not a very good DJ.  In fact, some might even call him a very bad DJ.  Most, if we're going to be honest.  

Exhibit 1:

In all fairness, when this kid and his band came up with the idea to compose rock songs and create "totally sick mixdowns" with the tracks, they probably thought they'd be doing something cool, like becoming the Nirvana of the 21st century, if Nirvana hadn't become so mainstream.  They'd be out there creating their brilliant music, and it'd be played in underground clubs across the nation.  Which is a cool dream to have.  It's cool to create brilliant music.  

Unfortunately for them, creating brilliant music takes talent, and talent can't be bought.  This kid sent my friend four tracks that his roommate's band wrote and he subsequently mixed down.  We listened to all four of them.  The opening of the first one wasn't half bad.

But then, someone started singing.

We tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, as no one's work can be 100% brilliant all of the time.  It is however, as we quickly learned, possible for someone's work to be 100% unbrilliant most of the time.  By the end of the last track, we looked at each other, wiped the blood off of our ears, and cried.  It was as if music itself was offended by the existence of this band and had decided to not cooperate.

Music was like, 

"We stand with the 99% of recordings out there that consist of real music!"

And this kid and his boys were all,

"Naww, we like making that last 1%.  It's so edgy and underground."

Then Music went,

"Well, we refuse to be used by you!"

And in keeping with the precedent set for resistance to the #occupy movements, this kid and his boys grabbed the closest weapons they had, in this case, their instruments and equipment, and lit the music up.    

It wasn't until afterwards that the boys realized that not only had they destroyed anything remotely resembling music theory, but they had broken their instruments in the process.  That didn't stop these kids, though.  Nope.  Like cockroaches, they proved über resilient and still managed to record something, which is admirable in a way.  Until you actually listen to the stuff.  The only way I can describe it is by saying it sounded like -- wait for it -- people messing around on broken instruments.  

And that's before the mixdown.