Frustration

I've been finding myself frustrated more and more often lately. First with my sister-in-law, then the phone company, and now my job. The president of our company is going to be retiring in a few years, and his son is gearing up to take over. This has meant a number of changes to the company, which hasn't been too much trouble. We've restructured a couple of departments, including mine, which led to my promotion, no problem there. A few cosmetic changes, fine. He's come up with a new logo for the company as well, which is where I'm starting to have problems.

You see, when I started to work here, I was a lab rat. I swapped duties back and forth daily with the other lab employee. Over the years, I've learned the other jobs in my department, and taken on new responsibilities, one of which has put me more or less in charge of creating and modifying the labels we put on our boxes. At first it wasn't much of a responsibility, as everything was really set up, I would just change the ingredients if we changed a formula, nothing major. Then we started running more tests on new products for new and potentially new customers, and it became my job to create the labels that would follow that product through the process. Also usually nothing major. Then the person that actually applies the labels to the product was going on vacation, and nobody else knew how to print the labels. Fine, I can take care of that for a couple of days, even though this person falls under the jurisdiction of the packaging department, not QA. See where I'm going with this? This has become part of my job, where it really should be the responsibility of the packaging department supervisor.

Today took the cake for me with this job though. Remember the new logo? Well, we package quite a few of our products under our house label, which has the company logo on it. So the new logo has to go on the labels. Well, nobody bothered to tell me anything about it, and suddenly today we're supposed to be switching over to the labels with the new logo on them, because we've run out of the old ones. No problem, right, I'll just reprint all of the labels, put them in the file, we'll be good to go. I'm a little upset that this is all happening at the exact last minute, but whatever. So I go over to the label computer, put up a roll of the labels with the new logo, and start printing. Well, the labels we have now are set up to print around the old logo, and.. oh look! The new logo is BIGGER than the old one! The data is overlapping the logo. Lovely. Most of the rest of my day has now been relegated to sorting through every label, checking it to see if anything is overlapping, and then when that's done, I get to trial-and-error my way through fixing things. All of these products are set up to print using three main templates, so if I fix one, I have to do so in such a way that it won't cause problems with any of the other ones. And it has to be done today, ASAP, because we only have half a roll of the labels with the old logo left. Way to think ahead, guys! Thanks for the heads-up that things were changing. Great.

Someone had better buy me some cookies or something, or things might get ugly. Did I mention that my monthly visitor came today too? Yay! Life just doesn't get any better than this.