The First Crisis (also known as “My Problem”)

“I need this yesterday!”

“OK, I’ll get right on it,” *furiously working for an hour, then* “It’s good to go.”

“Great…could you put three hours worth of changes on it, five hours of waiting for us to get back to you, and another day to make it look the way I see it in my head?”

“Sure…but see, this project was scheduled for an hour’s completion, and I have five other projects in my queue, so I won’t get back to this project for a week.”

“But we needed it yesterday!”

“Yes, I understand that. And that’s why I pushed all the other projects in my cue aside to make room for your project…wait, are you listening to me?”

“But we needed it yesterday!”

“Yeah, I caught that. I can definitely do the project now, but I will also tell Projects 1-5 that they will have delays and I will tell them why.”

“Well, can’t you just open it now and I’ll just tell you what to change?”

“No.”

“But the changes are just a period here, a comma there, and I really think that color green isn’t the color we use.”

“Okay – I can change the period, the comma, and then I have to resave the file, re-export it as a cooked-down PDF, replace all the sticky tags your requested, and send it to you. That’s going to take an hour.”

“But we needed it yesterday - and what about the color?”

“The color will print as a perfect Pantone match. It looks different on an HP inkjet because it’s not a professional-quality printer.”

“But it looks fine on my screen. And what are THOSE?”

“They’re crop marks.”

“We can’t have those in the final copy.”

“They’re crop marks. You cut them off.”

“Make one without the crop marks.”

“OK.”

“And we need this yesterday!”

“Really? I had no idea…”

“And can’t you just put it in PageMaker? I have PageMaker and I could just work on it myself.”

“No, I can’t It’s in Adobe InDesign.”

“Why don’t I have InDesign?”

“Because you’re a…um…you probably don’t have enough PITA memory to run it.”

“Well, convert it to PageMaker so I can work on it. It’s no use having only you work on it.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Why?”

“Because I’d have to start from scratch.”

“You’re making it more difficult than it should be if you’re not letting me help you.”

“Wow…I never thought of it that way.”

“So when can we have it?”

“With no other changes, an hour, maybe two.”

“Well, that’s ok, I guess…besides, we won’t show it to the CEO until Monday, and he’ll have corrections of his own.”

“But you needed it yesterday.”

“Oh, well, not literally. But we just needed it before next Monday.”

“But….it’s Monday now…you didn’t need it for seven days?”

“Thanks for all your help, bye!”

The Second Crisis (also known as “Your Problem”)

“I need this yesterday!”

“Ahhhhh….yes….Do you have about an hour to talk about it?”

“But I’ve got a meeting today, and I’ll be out of town tomorrow, and I don’t have time to discuss the project until Wednesday, or maybe Thursday…this is really inconvenient for me…I have five projects on my desk already, so I’ll have to clear my schedule somehow…let me get back to you…I mean, it’s not due until Monday anyway.”

until the next
Dyer Straits
Tom

Thomas (Tom) Stephan | Director of Something Clever
BoDo Author | Dyer Straits