It was a pretty wild day at the office. What’s really sad is that it wasn’t wild because I was cranking away on a high-profile assignment or an ultra-important project. No, it was wild because I was given a heap of data entry materials at the last minute and told to whip ‘em out in an hour. Well, whoops. It took four and a half. Gee, I hope that wasn’t a problem.

It’s the ongoing shitty assignment from a prominent magazine publisher, who uses several employees from my company as whipping boys on a regular basis and takes no responsibility for any failures it causes. We handle the content entry for a few of their advertiser list pages every month, and each month their salespeople send us all the forms that we then have to re-type into Excel. But then we have to resubmit the compiled Excel back to the publisher, and they have to verify that all the data is correct. We (read: I) then take the data and make a page out of it in Quack…I mean QuarkXPress, which the publisher then changes a billion times and screams at us for not doing it perfectly the first time.

The maddening thing about the latter point is, when we ask them to verify the spreadsheet, they never do. Half the time, I’m convinced they don’t even look at it. Like this time. We sent the spreadsheet to them, early in fact, and for a day and a half we heard nothing. I just learned about this today…it’s the reason why I got the materials an hour before they were due. Because the account manager had been waiting as long as she could to see if we’d hear something from the publisher, but we never did. When we hear nothing, we have instructions to assume that means everything is fine. I can’t believe this publisher. They actually say to us, “We’re not going to answer you. If you don’t hear anything, then there’s nothing wrong.” How hard would it be to actually e-mail us and say that nothing’s wrong?

Of course, the real problem is that there is something wrong. There always is. And that’s why I know they don’t even look at the flippin’ spreadsheet. Because the instant I slave away for hours to create that page in Quark and send it to them, all of a sudden they’re adding categories, changing advertisers, and having fits because of stuff that EXISTS IN THE SPREADSHEET IN BIG RED LETTERS, and if they’d so much as opened the Excel file, they would have seen it. And you know what? It’s really hard to care about your job, when you see that the people you’re doing the job for don’t care about you at all.

Then as soon as I got home this evening, calamity erupted. All I’ll say about that is: I had no idea Jesus Christ has taken to haunting President Bush. I guess this is a new stint for the Son of God. I wonder if the two of them gather ‘round the campfire down in Crawford, Texas and sing the Hussein Butt Song?

Narf.