And as many of you already know - I turned in my teacher's hat 3 years ago and this past year took on a new adventure/career in web design........... very junior to say the least - with no formal training. (unless you count the week in Ottawa with eldest daughter and some on going tutorials since)
Not everyone can be a teacher........ despite how many folks think it is an easy 10 month of the year job. It takes a lot of hard work/ planning/and people skills to be able to get your point/lesson across.
All that to come to the point of this morning's entry..............
Yesterday the boss of the company I work for asked me to do her a favour. They had a project that was due "like yesterday" (which seems to be the way they work - pressure pressure pressure)
I said sure give it to me............. then she says " well it's a little bit different from what you have been doing" and proceeds (via the miracle of skype and the internet) to show me her working screen. I saw a slide - something I am familiar with. Then she whips up another screen that looks like an excel file with text in it. She proceeds to tell me that even though this is NOT the project I will be doing - that this is how it works. And she starts clicking highlighting copying and pasting - so fast I have no idea what / where/ how.
I assumed I would be making slides - that's all I have ever done. NO.... she wanted me to make a text file. Ok that's not difficult - IF you tell me first what I am gonna be doing...
On the one hand I had slides that were about hazardous materials - the excel text files were about latex and she seemed to be copying and pasting willy nilly hazardous materials into latex. Are you confused yet?? I sure as hell was.
Finally I got the idea.. the latex page was just a template!! The hazardous slides were what she needed transformed into straight text. My mind is wondering where the original text files went and why they weren't just using them... shrug.. mine is not to reason why and all that.
After maybe 20 minutes of a lot of cut and paste - wham bang thank you Ma'am" style she left me on my own.
10 minutes later she is back to me - ooooooops - she made a mistake the file I am working on is not the file she needed "yesterday" would I mind switching to another file and do that one first.
I did.
About two thirds of the way through - I message her and say "it refuses to save" She doesn't answer - so I keep going. Finally when I am done - I message again. This time she says "just save it open text document" I do and upload it to her.
And start working on the next project. I notice in this one that the fonts are all different when I paste them. I figure out "select all " and change everything to one font and one size and then lo and behold it saves!!! Now I know what was wrong with the first project. At this point the boss messages me "I can't open the file" I try... no success - and trust me I tried everything - used every little trick I have learned about documents.. and nothing:(
She tells ME to see if I can figure it out a solution.
I spend an hour or so........... when she says "it's ok I just redid it"
GRRRRRRRRRR
She is not a teacher not even close. I would love to know WHO set up her templates for her. When I asked if it was excel - cause it looked like excel - she said no just a word document with boxes......... le sigh
There are days I honestly wonder if I am cut out for this job....even though - when left to my own devices with projects I have been taught to do (properly!) and figured out the few glitches on my own (trial and error style) I love it!!!
It would be a little bit better if I got paid for all the hours that I wasted yesterday - but I only get paid for completed projects...........not mistakes someone else has to redo :(
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