Diplomacy & Tact In The Absence Of Reason

Today at work I was handed a letter on company letterhead and was asked to sign it, after getting the gist of it. This was given to me at five minutes to five at the end of the day. It detailed a change in the working hours of all full time employees. Their great idea is to stagger three shifts so that there is at least one person in the department from 9am to 9pm. But this change reduces full time employees from a guaranteed bi-weekly eighty hours to sixty. Effectively, this cuts two hours from my day and $350 from my bi weekly paycheck after taxes. This was strike three for me.

I should point out that there have been countless number of strikes over the course of my eight year employment with this company, but for the purposes of metaphor, I'm only counting the most recent and most major ones. The fact that I have been working here this long at all is only due to two factors: a ridiculous sense of loyalty and a firm desire to keep a status quo and myself in food and shelter. But my tolerance is fast fading.

In Tarantino fashion, let's cut scene back to strike one. My employer recently changed head offices from a convenient location 25 minutes walk from my house to a remote location which requires me to take two busses and a taxi to get to. It completely screwed up my schedule with my daughter and required her to change school busses in order for her to go to daycare before school as well as after. This was a minor yet annoying alteration, so I was able to mostly adjust to this.

Strike two was the announcement in early January that salaried employees were now to be switched to hourly. This in itself was not a strike, because I admitted to all my superiors that I found the salary arrangement too difficult. While I enjoyed the constant paycheck amount, I had a child and I could not work overtime as a single parent, therefore when ever I missed a day, I was at odds with myself to reclaim those hours, which began to pile up. There were many hours in the spring that I took off in order to get my daughter home and set up, and there were a few sick days too, some at the end of the year when Drew had a kidney infection and was in the hospital for four days. As a result I was constantly harangued to break even with the time which was in excess of thirty hours at its peak. I did make a conserted effort but it was too much and there was not enough time to get to zero. So I admit my failing.

The second strike actually came from their not mentioning it until the policy was implimented. I was in the middle of budgeting myself to pay of previous debts under my new living arrangement with Sandra, and the prospects looked good - I would be out of debt before the end of the year. This would screw it all up. I tried to find out whether or not they were bound by law to inform me of this change in advance, and of course they are not. Once again the common working joe gets the bum's rush. If they had done it when I asked for it, or notified me in advance I could have prepared for it. I suggested midway through last year and on another occasion that they switch me to hourly because I could relax somewhat and not feel indebted to the company. I also suggested they dock me incrementally in order reconcile their payroll, and they didn't respond to any of my suggestions. At the end of it all my supervisor went to bat for me and made arrangements to spiff me for the difference with the payroll department. Thus my aformentioned loyalty to him particularly.

Some clarification: the 'supervisor' for the record is my former employer, who once owned the company but sold more than half of it to a Toronto concern, and who is currently in the process of delegating the remainder of his duties to others. But he was the one that first hired me, and to whom I seem to have the most respect. In truth, he has been there for me on many occasions, helped me financially when I needed money to visit and eventually get custody of my daughter, and has always been a source of support on many issues. That said, he has also stated that the level to which he can continue that support is all but depleted.

On the other side of the coin, the Toronto people, the ones who sign the checks are the ones I have the problem with. They cut corners, they don't respect their employees, and cheap out in order to make the most profit for themselves. But we'll get to more of that later.

So after having these two strikes already forced upon me, I had to figure out how to deal with these less than ideal circumstances. The answer was the same as it always was the other times I got to this crossroad: try my best to do my job and not let the bastards get me down. This was after a sit down with the supervisor about the new year and the issues that the head office had with me. Among the items brought up were:

• missed hours
• quality of work
• attitude

The missed hours I could hardly argue with and I had to accept that with my previous explanation given. As for quality of work, this is hardly a cut and dried situation. With that in mind, lets take a trip into the wonderful world of graphic design as it relates to my current position.

There are three types of ads that we get. New ads, pickups, and revisions. Pickups and revisions are previously run ads and generally take between five and twenty minutes to complete. New ads, depending on their complexity can take up to two hours starting from scratch. Lets split the difference and say that pickups and revisions take ten minutes and new ads take an hour.

Each of our publications has about 35 ads in it, at least half of which are pickups or revisions. That leaves the other half as new ads. 17 new ads should take 17 hours and 18 pickups or revisions should take about three hours. Therefore, in manhours, each book should take abut 20 hours. Of course that's assuming that each ad only comes in once, but of course there are revisions and corrections, and sometimes the guy decides he wants to start over. On average, each ad comes back about three times. For the sake of conservation let us just assume that only half of the ads come back three times. So you can add another five hours to the total.

Now, we have 23 books on our largest run, each taking 25 hours. So the whole run takes about 575 manhours, or almost 24 days. Divide that by the number of graphics people working concurrently and each person is working for eight days on the run.

We currently have three people in the department. But the third person was only hired this January. Prior that, there were two of us. So each person was at that point working for 12 days on a run. There is also the time required to paginate the book and prepare it for press, basically an entire day in itself.

That may not seem like much to complain about, to the person who is outside the situation. But bear in mind that I'm being conservative here with the time factors. Realize that we aren't just doing the above example run. We currently run six different magazines on a staggered print schedule. Before one production run ends, another has already begun. Add to this the fact that we are also doing non-magazine jobs such as direct mail postcards, business cards, internal graphics and forms, Canada Post prep, the graphics work for three, count them, THREE other companies associated with the company, as well as answering phones, being forced to go to production meetings... the list goes on.

This rather long winded point that I'm trying to make is simply this... There isn't enough time to spend on any individual ad, you have to just crank them out, otherwise the whole thing would break down, disrupting the print schedule. So when I am being scolded about the quality of my work, I can't help but laugh. I have long since lost any graphical creativity I had in me thanks to this job. I have been shot down too many times when I thought I've done something that would be liked, that I didn't bother to try anymore. And realistically, when you have to rifle through your work so much, you can't be truly creative.

Most of the time, advertising is not a place for creativity. It is a place for doing what you are told, even if it completely goes against your sensibilities. Because that's what the client is paying for.

The thing about 'quality of work' that keeps coming back to haunt me is because of a high profile client whose ad ran with a wrong phone number. The blame for that is being placed squarely on yours truly. For the folly of that scenario, please read on.

Normally in any advertising situation there is a multi-tiered proofing process. The ad gets submitted by an ad rep and done by the designer. When completed, the designer proofs it to make sure that everything is correct and sends it back to the sales rep. The rep proofs it before sending it to the client. The client proofs it and either approves it for print or sends it back. Every time it passes through the chain of revisions, it is proofed by each person who handles it. Finally, the ad is proofed before peing placed in the grid and send to the printer as a finished document.

Now with all those people handling the document, does it seem reasonable that I am taking 100% of the blame for this mis-typed phone number? The client should have been the FIRST to notice it was wrong. With myself, the rep and the client and the art director all handling proofing duties (supposedly) the most responsibility I am willing to accept on this issue is 25%.

But none of that means anything because they will think and do what they want. Because they have all the power and sign the paychecks.

Thus we come to issue three: attitude. Well yes, given the tenor of this writing, I can admit that I have a bad attitude. But I assure you that I try my utmost to keep it in check while on the job. I must be doing alright, otherwise they would not have kept me for eight years. Nonetheless, I, as well as the other two people in my department are overworked and sometimes it gets the better of us. Having said that, the 'attitude' issue comes without any specific examples, and I have asked them to cite some. They cannot come up with a single one.

Its difficult to have a positive (or at least an apathetic) attitude when you try your best to do your job and still get told that it's not good enough. I'm not the perfect employee by most standards (I'm not even sure what the perfect employee might be like), but I do my job the best I can and I often do more than I am asked to do... even if it doesn't bring immediate rewards. The problem is that if you do that too often people expect it of you all the time, and sometimes you fall short and look bad.

Which all brings us back to today. The art director was the one that handed the letter to me and he tried to tell me that the 30 hours per week reduction was probably not going to fly because of the demands for hours during a production. But that still does not stop them from kicking me out at 3:00pm any other day. It's still a pay reduction and all overtime will have to be approved.

Following the announcement of reduced hours, there were several paragraphs specifically written for me, wherein they reiterated the concerns brought up at the previous sitdown I had. The general tenor of the letter was quite condescending and I took offence at some of the wording. It reminded me of being back in school and being told that I was on thin ice and would fail a grade if I didn't shape up.

My first thoughts before I formed my next sentence were to recall the events of the last two months. The production schedule of 2009 having been so intense, so delayed and so screwed up, the art director (a salaried position) had banked over 80 hours above his salary. So, naturally, he took a month off. That left me holding the fort for most of december and the first week of January. Normally these months are dead for the print and advertising industry (the Christmas push is done end of November and doesn't kick up again until just before Valentine's Day), but my place of employment is always the exception. There were still all those other jobs to be done; the standalones, the other three companies, and a bunch of long term projects that I had to put off completing until this particular 'dead period'. Of course I never got to any of my projects, because the period wasn't dead at all, and I am being scolded for that too. One of them is the ad archive, a tool for the salesmen, which is grossly backlogged, and has no hope of being updated under these new guidelines. I have begged for someone to outsource this, but nothing ever happens.

I held things together quite well for those weeks alone, jumping when I was told to jump, and I think I did it well. I worked so hard that I began to get very pent up and experienced a long stint of heart palpatations that I can only attribute to stress. They called me on Christmas Eve and asked me to do an emergency job, when I was supposed to be off and spending time with my daughter, a period of time I was allowed by my supervisor, but I offered to be available 'just in case'.

He should not have been allowed to bank so many hours and disappear for a month. He left me with half finished projects I've never touched and had no idea what their status was or in many instances where to find the files. I don't blame him, I blame the general mismanagement of the production schedule and the company, and the fact that there is no structure to the organization, no prioritization of tasks (everything seems urgent) and no adequate communication among the ranks.

I find everything out through the trickle-down theory. I find out about a policy after its been implemented and too late to give input. I'm given too many tasks at once and not enough time to complete them correctly. I'm given conflicting instructions and policies that are changed after a week. I suppose this is nothing new in any workplace. But it's not something I deal well with. I prefer order, clear instructions and tasks, and not having to wonder how I'm going to get screwed over every day. Call me crazy...

I came back in January with the hopes that things would get better. I began to offer options to increase productivity and streamline the process. I crossed all my I's and dotted all my T's and tried to bring everyone together for the benefit of all, realizing that the company's growth is surpassing the workforce. Salesmen are being hired willy nilly and new publications and editions are being added every month, but the graphics department is somehow experiencing a budget crisis. This ... doesn't ... make ... any ... sense. If you sell more franchises, you make more money. It's proportional, or at least it should be, in theory. You can't double your publications and not add to your designers. But I guess I'm asking too much from the world of business, when people are still crying resession, boo hoo.

The long and the short of it is that I didn't sign the letter. I left the office abruptly before I said something I was going to regret. The letter and the announcement was yet another slap in the face, and categorically refuse to sign any document that I don't agree with.

Some say not signing the letter will be reason enough for them to become disciplnary with me, but I don't see that at all. They need an experienced employee as much as I need a job, there is no time to retrain someone. And, really, regardless of whether I sign it or not they are still going to do what they want so it really doesn't matter what I do.

Some are concerned that I am going into work expecting to get fired, or to quit outright, but I'm not there yet. I've worked to hard to get out of the mire to this meagre position in life to throw it away out of anger and a sense of entitlement. I'm trying to be fair and admit that I'm not perfect, and I'm not about to jeopardize my daughter's quality of life by acting without a backup plan.

A friend of mine who has been through this before suggested that I have two courses of action at this point. I can respond to the letter and ask for clarification on the 'issues' contained therein, and ask for suggestions to improve a 'perceived problem'... the idea being that I am not at that point acknowledging or agreeing with the contents of the letter or its issues. He suggested also asking for some face time with the decision makers in an effort to help change their perceptions of a problem. That's certainly one way to go. Correpsonding by letter or through an intermediary is certainly not the same as face to face, but I don't think Dale Carnegie is going to work in this scenario because my perception is that these people are a joke. I frankly cannot stand to be in the same room as them. It's that bad.

The other option he suggested was that this really isn't worth fighting for. The way the letter is written is quite clearly trying to set me up as the weakest link in the chain, since they are having organizational issues on their end as well, and since they must appear to be above reproach, the blame has to go to somone. In light of that, it seems clear that I should pursue another path. That is something that I've been putting off for a lot longer than I care to say, but I feel the time has finally come to make the big push and get out before I lose my sanity. Not the best jump-off point to start a job hunt, but is there really a good one?

I have been doing graphics in general and this job in particular for eight years. It was only meant to be a temporary job to get me through back in 2001. I've really, really had enough. As I was saying to Sandra the other day, the fact that my job means nothing in the grand scheme of things is a great source of distress for me. I don't help anyone in this job. I don't make a difference in anyone's life when I'm there. I just add to the already bloated and garish behemoth known as advertising, and I work in an industry which is known as one of the most wasteful in terms of paper and resources. And for what? At the end of the day does anyone really give a shit about yet another piece of unsolicited advertising in their mailbox, or that I personally helped create it? Of course they don't. And neither do I.

Regardless of who is right or wrong in this mess, or whether I'm a whiny baby who is llucky to have a job, and who should just suck it up, as some random people out there might think, there is a bottom line: a lot of other aspects of my life are starting to come together but this is one area where I'm not satisfied, and I just can't tolerate it anymore. I need a paradigm shift of some sort, and I think I'm on the heels of figuring out where it might lead. I shouldn't wake up dreading the day ahead, it's just not right. Something needs to be done and soon.