Posted by noa on February 12, 2004, at 20:02:57
In reply to Re: Feeling highly irritated and frustrated right now, posted by deirdrehbrt on February 12, 2004, at 10:10:21
Slightly tangential letterhead/frustrating work story coming..but hey, that's what the internet is full of, right....
Years ago I worked for an agency that started small and was growing. We were housed in 'temporary' offices and were in search of new space. They found the new space and started making plans for the move. The director began obsessing about everything. She brought in paint chips for us to vote on the paint color. Carpet samples for the carpets. Etc. Etc. It was all so exciting.
As we were waiting for the arrangements to be finalized and our new permanent space to be finished, etc.....we ran out of letterhead. Since there was a plan to move soon, but it wasn't finalized, they told us to photocopy (back then we actually called in 'xeroxing') the stationary since it was a temporary situation.
In the meantime, the director was getting new letterhead designed. She met with a graphic artist contractor and began obsessing about the logo and design and color, etc. This led to her beginning to wonder if we should change the name of the firm. Yes, there were issues with the firm name--sometimes it seemed not to convey what we were about---but of course, this led the director to begin obsessing about the name of the firm, along with everything else.
Then one day, she came back from meeting with the artist and proclaimed to the entire office: "The artist looked at me today and said, 'You know what, Cate? Your problem is you don't have a concept." Well, this was like a whole new spirituality of management had been opened up for Cate--and we had to start obsessing about what our concept was.
Throughout this time, we kept reminding her that we needed stationary. We had been using the photocopied version but it was rather not very impressive to send out letters on it, etc.
And, then it happened.....somewhere during this long, bizarre process, some idiot in the office USED THE LAST BLANK COPY OF THE PHOTOCOPIED LETTERHEAD!!!!
Mind you, this was before Windows (we did have MS DOS computers in the office that baffled most of us because you had to type in computerese to get anything out of them), so it's not like we could print out new sheets or anything.
We had to start photocopying letters from files, whiting out the text, and photocopying these to make blank Nth generation photocopied stationary! It was so absurd.
Epilogue: When we FINALLY moved to the new space--guess what color the walls and carpet were!!
Walls--real estate cheap white.
Carpet--nonexistent.
poster:noa
thread:312042
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20040209/msgs/312595.html