The problem at work basically boils down to two things.

One, the projects I’m working on are both being managed by people who aren’t Chris. Chris is my darling and knows exactly what I need to do my job. The other guys really don’t. They’ve never worked in printing or publishing before (Chris was the editor of the Georgetown paper), they can’t remember the simplest things I repeat over and over (do not give me a tracked changes document to lay out!), and their organizational skills are for shit (I can’t explain this; it’s just a personal shortcoming in these people). Chris is mostly editing now (for three weeks he’s been doing nothing else) instead of project-managing, and hopefully this is a trend that will soon reverse. Our second-biggest yearly project (the UNDP Human Development Report) is coming up, and if someone other than Chris is put in charge of it, I swear to you that I will quit. I. Will. Quit.

Two, people are morons. One of the two projects referenced above had a “hard and fast” (read: soft and squishy) deadline of last Friday at 3 pm. It still isn’t done, although we have sent it to the printer. Three times so far. They’re just going to go ahead and make their last edits at the blueline stage. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the printing industry and the entire process it takes to make a book, and it’s this kind of naivete that makes books late and makes us end up having to explain to the client why their press charges just doubled. By the second book they work on, they finally realize that it takes the same amount of time to print a book no matter when you give it to the printer, every time you make a change that amount of time *starts over*, and you WILL pay extra when you make guys who are in a union work overtime on weekends. But this is only the first book these people have worked on, and they don’t get it at all. There’s no padding in their deadline (it’s a book about Wolfensohn, and he’s LEAVING at the end of the month), but they don’t seem to understand that they can’t have a book printed on May 18th if they’re still making changes on May 5th.

I realize I’ve been doing this a long time, and most people haven’t, but I firmly believe that most things are simple, and most people are smart enough to understand things once they’ve been explained no more than twice.* How hard is it to grasp that the ink has to dry before you can varnish the cover, that it takes a couple of days, a plan, a page count, and several forklifts for the printer to have the right amount and type of paper and ink on time, that production (me), prepress (at the printer), and printing itself are three distinct steps and NOT a magic black hole that instantly makes Word files into shiny paperbacks, and so on?

*I’m really wrong about this.

It’s just bothersome. I am tired of being the only person around me who understands the tail end of the publishing business. It’s not even the technical things. I enjoy explaining process color, moire, halftoning, varnish, aqueous gloss, paper stock, and binding. I’m a little tuckered out on explaining dots per inch (that’s a great logo you downloaded off the web, but we still can’t print it). But I am SICK AND TIRED of having no support and no mentoring and no collegiality. I am tired of explaining the same thing to the same people over and over and over again. Yes, black counts as a color. No, you can’t bind a 173-page book. No, I can’t make the columns balance without a text edit. If I could, I would have, as I did in the other sixty cases where the columns didn’t balance until I used my l33t copyfitting skills, and I wouldn’t be *asking* for a text edit. No, the guy who answers Shelley’s phone and the MBA in the next office over really *weren’t* qualified to fill in for me while I was out, and yes, I really DO need to redo the work.

I know what you’ll say, and you’re right, but I need the benefits.