I am angry beyond words. Enraged. Livid. We’re talking a real “KHAAAAAN” moment.

This afternoon, at 4:30, I received an email from one of the bazillion employees who are currently out of the office enjoying a few extra days of Thanksgiving vacation. It was from one of our account managers, the person with whom I work on all of the insipid ad page setups I am constantly doing. The email included the PDF files from the October 2004 issue I built for one of the magazines way back in July, and said simply, “Can you make Quark files for these? The client would like them sent out by tomorrow.”

RAGE. BIG SCREAMIN’ RAGE.

Obviously, no one reading this will understand why that’s so maddening, so allow me to explain. I use Adobe InDesign to create these ad pages. It’s an application that competes with QuarkXPress, which sucks. I used to use Quark and hated its sloppy, buggy, ugly, curmudgeony interface, but had no choice because this publishing company printed directly from the native Quark files back in those days and couldn’t use anything else. Then, about a year ago, they switched to printing direct to plate from PDFs, so I thought, hey, maybe I can use InDesign now that they seem to be application independent. I went through all the correct channels, had this account manager get in contact with the production department at this publishing house, and verify that we could switch to InDesign so long as we continued to provide the PDFs as we have been doing. Super, they said. No problem with us; we don’t need Quark anymore. So I happily made the switch.

And so now here I am, inexplicably getting this asshat request from this same publisher, who for some asinine reason wants Quark documents now for an issue I designed almost half a year ago ago, the printed version of which has been on sale for over a month. I can’t even begin to fathom why they want these Quark files, because the account manager didn’t bother to tell me, or include any of her prior email communication with the client. Since Adobe hates Quark and wants them to die, InDesign likes to pretend that QuarkXPress doesn’t exist, so in order for me to provide these ad pages in Quark format, I have to RECREATE THEM ALL FROM SCRATCH MANUALLY.

Even this is a task in an of itself. You can’t just copy and paste the whole page, because each paragraph has style sheet elements assigned to it. InDesign puts that data on the clipboard when you copy, but Quark can’t understand it, so it throws it away. Your choice then becomes one between the lesser of two evils: Copy the whole page into a big screamin’ mess and manually reapply style tags to every paragraph, reader service number and advertiser name, OR copy and paste one line of the page at a time. Both of those sound like major fun to do at 10 O’CLOCK IN THE FUCKING EVENING, which is obviously when I would need to be doing it if I were to get these pages ready BY TOMORROW!!

But like a good little soldier who never questions orders (that’s another Shatner line, for those playing along at home), I decided to spend all night getting this task done. I had an older issue that I had done in Quark, and figured I’d just do the maddening copy/paste procedure and be done with it. It would take a few hours, but at least it would be over. But there was a problem. As I started working, I suddenly realized it was a lot worse than I thought. After we made the switch from Quark to InDesign earlier this year, the publisher came to us wanting some changes to their pages. I effected a small redesign. New fonts, colors, style sheets, an additional instruction block here and there, a new design for the reply card, yada yada. NONE OF THOSE CHANGES ARE PRESENT IN ANY EXISTING LEGACY QUARK FILE. So not only to I have to copy/paste all of the listings from the October issue into a Quark file, I have to REDESIGN THE QUARK FILE as well. Update all the style sheets. Change all the fonts. Set the RSN colors. Add the text blocks. Readjust the content block dimensions.

And then I realized something ELSE. Back in those days, when I wasn’t so proficient at page layout, I supplied the publishers with their reply cards in Adobe Illustrator format. If the client wants their October issue in all Quark files now, I’m going to have to create their BRC card in Quark FROM SCRATCH, since no Quark version of it ever existed! THE FUN JUST KEEPS MOUNTING, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!

But wait! As if that weren’t bad enough! After working on this until about 10:00 tonight, Quark suddenly crashed—WHILE I WAS SAVING MY FILE. Horrified, I discovered that each time I subsequently attempted to reopen the file, Quark crashed immediately. Great—it corrupted my file WHILE SAVING, and now the file was useless! I was then faced with starting all over again!

At that point, fed up beyond all belief, I remotely logged into my computer at work, pulled up the asinine, careless, I-don’t-give-a-shit single-sentence email from that account manager at work and fired back a lengthy reply, explaining that the request wasn’t going to get done in 24 hours, it was a huge amount of work, and I did not feel obliged in continuing to perform this task until she gave me the respect I deserve by telling me the reason for the client’s request and providing a bit of information on why the Quark files are needed. I hate when people just relay orders without giving me any details. Half the time, they are asking me to do something worthlessly time-consuming when, if I simply knew the goal of the project, I could suggest a much more efficient solution. But when the damn account manager doesn’t even give me the chance to save myself, her and the client some time, I just get so fucking furious. How much time and effort would it take to actually write a couple more sentences explaining the situation? Don’t just say “Do it and do it by tomorrow.” Our company is very small and we do not have enough people on staff to just hand out tasks and expect people to act like mindless drones. Everybody needs to get involved, everybody needs to play a part and everybody needs to fucking understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Otherwise they’re just worthless flotsam that should be jettisoned.

I’m absolutely dizzy with wrath right now. I swear that as I sit here typing this, I feel like I’m falling into my monitor. But I know I won’t be able to sleep because I don’t know what course this mess is going to take tomorrow. Will that account manager even get back to me? She’s supposedly off on vacation, after all. Will I have this haunting me over the holidays? Will I have to involve the chief of account management and client operations? Worse yet, will I be spending this year’s Turkey Day putting together a bunch of fricking Quark files for a stupid motherfucking asshat ad page? Meanwhile, another very nosy client is browbeating us severely to finish a site redesign which they barely granted us enough time to complete, and I absolutely need to spend all day tomorrow working on that. Even if I could whip out these stupid Quark files in a few hours, I simply don’t even have the time for that! The whole fucking world is coming apart!

Well, this whole goddamn disaster has spurred me into at least one type of action. I’m going to use my four-day holiday weekend—assuming I’m not spending it building Quark files, which is still a very distinct possibility—to update my resume, get to work on a basic self-promoting website, and start looking for new jobs in the local area. I am so fucking done with this place that it’s not even the slightest bit funny.

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!