Marathon Monday

Today has been one of those days where technology has decided to be a royal pain in the arse at every turn. And considering what I do for a living, this can be an issue.

What do I do, I hear you ask?? (hehe I know, it's the echo). Well, at this stage of my life, I find myself working as a Mac Operator, or a Graphic Artist. And I am doing this as a freelancer. Well, really it's more like a temp than a freelancer. Freelancer kinda infers that I work independently on projects, whereas what I really do is go into studios and offices during their busy periods, and when people are away.

I have been really lucky in my nearly 12 months of freelancing that I have spent 9 months of it working fulltime for a great design studio, with people whose company and humour I really enjoyed. Having come from a corporate environment, where I was the resident freak, suddenly be surrounded by like-minded people was enlightening and enriching. And good fun!!!

Unfortunately freelancing projects come to an end, and so I'm back to doing a day here, a day there. Which means working on different machines all the time. And this brings me back to my original point (yes, I do tend to ramble away on tangents quite frequently). The machine I was on today simply did not want to play fair. It was into serious mind games. The kind of mindgames where you would start a file, save the file continuously during the creating of the artwork, and then close the file. It would then be a reasonable assumption that you would later be able to open said file again. Nup. Not gonna happen. Doesn't matter how many times you try baby, I got you figured. You are not opening that file. NOOO. I'll freeze then. Huh, sucked in. Restart me, see if I care. Won't make any difference.

That was the course of my day. I did eventually get the artwork done, but it took hours longer than it needed to, and I hate to think how hopeless the client must have thought I was. Sigh, oh well.

So I have a drink with a friend after work, which was just what I needed to give me that alcohol induced attitude adjustment. Feeling much better, I head off home. And once home I decided to check emails and the like. Ok, whatever attitude adjustment I had went completely out the window when this MONGREL of a thing decided to play mind games as well. Not going to log onto the Internet. Oh, I'll log on for a minute, and then stall. And again. And again. What the hell am I paying for ADSL for!!!!. In a state of complete frustration I gave up. And of course, once it sensed victory, it decided it would work. Which is, of course, how I can now be posting this.

I'm sure absolutely everyone has stories of borderline violence (if not actual violence) that they've wanted to inflict on their computers. I've never been one of them (apart from an incident where fist met printer once, but that's another story). I've prided myself on my patience and logical elimination of possible causes of the problem. But tonight, I wear my badge proudly. TECHNOLOGY SUCKS!!!

oh, no, I didn't mean You, my little laptop. Of course I love you. (shhh don't let on, otherwise it'll just boot me again, and I just don't have the resilience to fight back anymore *sob*)