A Wee Rant

Are best practices in accounting a matter of "personal preference?"
How about nursing, or social work?

How about graphic design?

I'm starting to weary of teaching clients, for example, that squeezing a column of text into a too-narrow space with no gutters and too many hyphens and too small a point size isn't a matter of personal taste — there are rules here, and following them gives you one result, and not following them gives you another. Which do you want?

A Wee Puzzle

You have an 8.5" x 11" piece of paper you'd like to cut into four equally sized rectangles. Do you:

A) Divide both 8.5 and 11 by 2 to obtain measurements
B) Fold paper into rectangles, then use ruler to obtain measurements
C) Go over to the paper cutter and eyeball it
D) Interrupt graphic designer to ask if she "remembers"

F U

Someone with these attributes, skills, and extensive software knowledge should be offered, in this geographic area, at least three times what this company is offering, and be offered a salary, not a friggin' hourly rate.

Ass berets.

But some poor soul in desperate need of a job will accept it, thus undercutting the rest of us.

I'm half tempted to take it myself, just for the pleasure of churning out some shitty designs with naughty subliminal pictures hidden in them.

Denied

I did not get the job. This is approximately how I feel:

I Wanna Drive the Zamboni

If you don't know the silly song: here.

Bummed

The second interview lasted over an hour and I got a tour of the office. But today I got the rejection letter in the mail. I am totally bummed - I was already imaging what life would be like with one, full-time job.

Goat Tea

I hold a part-time job on the side proofreading for a brand quality assurance company. Each quarter, the brand auditors (mystery shoppers) go out to every location of a nationally-known coffee shop and then file their little spy reports online. The forms are standardized, the information the nationally-known coffee shop is looking for is very specific, and a style guide is issued to each shopper. The company needs people to edit the raw reports because some of the shoppers evidently have no more read the style guide than they have read Boйнa и миp in the original Russian.

The register smiles and makes eye contact. Barristers mix drinks. Things start to heat up when employees service patrons. The pasty cases are clean and full of delicious-looking pasties, which could mean one thing in Sault Sainte Marie and something totally different on, say, Sunset Boulevard. In the employee description section, one gentleman was said to have a “goat tea.”

Is that made by Twinings?

Really, most of the mystery shoppers provide good reports and have a better grasp on usage than the above examples. I don't mean any harm by this post (please don't dooce me!). It's great that I get to work at home in my pajamas, cat on feet, mug of darjeeling, or Irish breakfast, or genmai-cha in hand.

One of these days I’ll have to try that goat tea. Now 'scuse me as I kiss this guy.