My this installment, I will carefully describe my position at a print shop. This place made vinyl graphics primarily, for both auto and business storefronts. They were good at it, too. They had one guy, Joe, who did all the work, though. I felt really bad for him because he always had ten things on his plate to do. On top of that, they started to get into other avenues like embroidery, silk screening, and web design. The latter is where I come in. Cut to the interview.

My friend Matt worked for this company and left because it was pretty bad, but I needed a job and this place at least did what I wanted to do. I sat down with my future boss and he told me that there was all this web work coming in and I would be working with clients as well as working our personal site. Half of that was a lie.

So first day, I start working. I’ve got my own little setup and a desk and I’m working and everything is good for the first few months. We’ll say three months, if I have to date it. In that time I did a lot of stuff. It was kind of cool. I would do a few hours of computer work, then I would strip vinyl, or prep a car for decals, or cut down board for vinyl application. I didn’t mind it. It was a nice change of pace. I learned a lot about the whole industry and it was informative.

Here’s what was terrible. My boss was pretty terrible. Think Michael Scott in all his glory but with less paper and less fun. That’s about it. I think that I nailed it.

So a few months down the line, we moved to a different location. That kind of sucked because I lived like a mile and a half from the initial location and then it was like ten miles away. It’s fine. I’m not complaining about that. So we moved. The problem was that the old location was finishing up old jobs before they moved all their equipment to the new location. Computers can move, so I could move as well. I worked by myself in this place for about two weeks. One week I spent like 10 hours setting up the phone systems, not because I wasted my time, but because my boss needed to know everything about the phones. Being there by myself led me to other tasks, like picking up dog poop, taking out the garbage, and getting things out of a zero-extra-space garage. I’m surprised that I didn’t impale myself on anything. Oh, remember that lie I was talking to you about? Here’s the explanation. We didn’t take on any clients. None. Not one. Not even a two day “banger”. I just worked on the internal site day in, day out. It got redundant. Build this page, build this calculator, build this page, add this picture of my dog to the site. It was bad. The site was fine. The codebase left a little to be desired, but I cleaned it up.

Onto my demise…
As the site neared completion, and with no new work coming in, I put myself out of business. So one week I would work 40 hours, then 30, then 20, then “On Call”. I would go two, three, five days without a call. After I went two weeks with no call I considered it over. It was basically a lame way of laying me off or firing me without having any sort of confrontation.