(no subject)
My job is cool, but I don't know how long I can take these hours. An hour and a half of work on Wednesday. Four hours today. They're killing us, those slavedrivers!
When I read rollick's story of how she became an Editor at The Onion, I was filled with awe. So fucking cool! How do you do that? How can you become an Editor of anything, much less something as awesome as The Onion? How do you get to interview famous people and work in such a fun-sounding office? It sort of baffled me.
But the tone that she wrote her story in was a very calm one. She started with work experience A, then job B, then contact C, and, eventually, a job at The Onion.
That's how I feel about Hasbro. I'm tickled pink, even to be just a six-month Temp, but the job I'm doing is something familiar. If I were a kid just out of college, like one of my fellow-Temps, then I'm sure I'd be disappointed at my actual job. Let me try to begin at the beginning.
If you're a Graphic Designer who registers with a Graphic Designing Agency, sometime you're going to be called for comp work. It's just about the shittiest job possible in my field. I've had to do it twice before. Two brief gigs where I went home with strained muscles all over my hands, arms, back, and neck. Two brief gigs where I'd get a headache by 2 o'clock every day, from the fumes of the spray-mount and the junk we used to clean up all the excess residue that the spray-mount left. Two brief gigs of cut skin, dull drudgery, and fingers covered in blisters and callouses. Comp work is a full day of cutting out box artwork, sticking it to toyboxes, assembling said boxes, and sometimes placing toys, or pictures of toys, in place. Tedious and difficult, but you do get to see what toys are going to be rolling out sometime soon. We only make limited runs. The real packages for the real toys are made in China, like the toys themselves. So the job I do is done by a machine somewhere in China.
Lots of fun, let me tell you.
But I could take it. I could do it, and do it pretty well. Most Temps in those gigs would last a day or two, I stuck it out for the full two weeks each time. Six months of it? Sure, I know I can do it. The stubborn donkey throws her shoulders against the traces and trudges on. It's easy, so far. Not just because of technical improvements and such . . . I know I'm not just doing a job that needs to be done, I'm very aware that I'm sitting on the lowest rung of the ladder. My legs are dangling down, but my eyes are fixed above me. Package Designer. Package Illustrator. Photographer. Hasbro Interactive Animator. Toy Designer. It would take time, but it would be worth my while to stick around.
My job is to make sure that not only is this department impressed as all hell with me, but that everyone I can talk to has had a chance to find out what a delightfully offbeat character I am. And anything that anybody will teach me about how things work at Hasbro . . . I want to soak it up like a sponge.
Mmm, I'm not making this very coherent. Must still be the denial. Despite the fact that I purchased $40 worth of toys today for about $10, I still don't really believe this is happening. But I should write something, even as fresh as this all is. Somebody out there must want to know what it's like to work at a toy factory.
I can't tell you anything about new toys, of course. I signed an NDA for Lucasfilms on my first day, and another for Hasbro today. My NDA included intellectual property, but that isn't a problem . . . if I have an idea for a toy so fabulous that I think it ought to be made, I'll just find a Hasbro designer to pitch it to.
So, my first day of work. Big stack of paperwork to fill out, of course. And then- nothing. My boss assigned someone to teach me the ropes, but there wasn't anything to do. By the time stuff started flooding in, I took one look at it and was confident I could do it more or less on my own. No training. Yay!
Spray-mount has been replaced. We have these great machines, in three sizes, that basically turns paper into stickers. So the bottom gets all sticky, and we just press it on. No more fumes! No more extra stickiness to remove later! It's beautiful. Easy and fun. The X-acto knives are still a pain in the ass. I blooded my knife today: my wound has a bruise around it that makes it look like I started Hari-Kari on the right side of my belly and changed my mind. But that's all so far, and it was really no big deal. We use scissors a lot, too, since they give us these great precision-cutting scissors. So I balance out the pain by Xactoing with my left hand and scissoring with my right.
I haven't burned myself with my glue gun yet, but I barely use it. Our double-sided tape is really strong.
When I first went to the cafeteria, I was a little disappointed. I'd expect the company that makes Candy Land to have a lollipop tree or a peanut brittle house or something . . . but no, the workers were all clustered around the salad bar. The food's pretty good, and it's cheaper than at NYLIM. Probably farther-from-Boston-ness. But I won't eat there all too often. Even after my bills are caught up and there's a nice (positive) balance in my savings account, I still prefer to bring lunches from home and save money. Besides, I'm still a picky eater, and there's not lots there that looked appealing.
There's a lovely outdoor eating area with benches and a grape arbor and a little lawn . . . I could hold a picnic, if I wanted to. The indoor dining area is huge. One brick wall is covered with really cool, colorful metal sculptures of simplified people. I really like the decor in the building, in general. When they aren't touting their stuff (Scrabble, Monopoly, Jenga, Cooties, My Little Pony, Play-Doh, GI Joe, Playskool, Weebles, Pokemon, Transformers, and lots of other things), they have public art. It's all over the place.
Lack of public art is one of my big reasons for hating Boston, and several other cities. No art, nothing to catch my eye, what's the point of walking around you? Meh. And don't you Bostonians all remind me of the three or four large wind-sculptures and the stuff at Logan, that's been there since the seventies.
The reason I worked for only an hour and a half on Wednesday was because they held an Adobe Creative Suite seminar, and Temps were allowed to go. Almost everything she went over was features I hadn't heard of or barely started using, so it was really exciting. Sometime into the second hour, she said she wished she had stickers to give out, because she'd give me a sticker for how often I raised my hand when she asked questions starting with, "Does anybody use this feature in Photoshop/Illustrator . . . ?" I told her I'd make her a sticker so she could sign it and give it back to me. At the very end, when everybody else had left, I asked if she worked out of the California Adobe office. She said she worked from the New York office, but she did know people . . . I told her to say hi to my brother for me.
Hey, both me and my bro are both working in awesome dreamy wonderful companies! How cool is that?
When I got back from the seminar, there was just half an hour until the whole Creative Services department marched out to go to Dave & Buster's. I guess every Christmas and July, they do some outing where they feed us and we get to do a "team-building" exercise. I cringed at the latter, but it went OK. We were sent on a Scavanger Hunt, and some of the things you had to play games in order to get. So at least we didn't spend the whole time looking for stupid factoids about D & B.
Our team came in third. Then we got released, and I spent a good hour or so spending the remaining balance on the card they gave us. A goodly chunk of it went to breeding and training and racing a new filly named Cloudy Day. I think I have a better handle on the game, though I should whip hard at the beginning of the races, not the end. lediva, any time you want to come down and play, I'd be happy to spend a few hours racing.
Today I only worked a half-day because the Comp crew had outraced the Printers. So this afternoon, they're printing up a whole pile of shit, and tomorrow I'll have a long day.
I hope it's not too long: United Skates of America is only two miles from Hasbro, and I still haven't gone roller skating! Today was my first day biking, and I think I'll not do it two days in a row quite yet.
I still have to get up at the crack of dawn to catch the bus, unless I carpool with ezrarashkae. Hmm, maybe I'll see if she's cool with that.
When I read rollick's story of how she became an Editor at The Onion, I was filled with awe. So fucking cool! How do you do that? How can you become an Editor of anything, much less something as awesome as The Onion? How do you get to interview famous people and work in such a fun-sounding office? It sort of baffled me.
But the tone that she wrote her story in was a very calm one. She started with work experience A, then job B, then contact C, and, eventually, a job at The Onion.
That's how I feel about Hasbro. I'm tickled pink, even to be just a six-month Temp, but the job I'm doing is something familiar. If I were a kid just out of college, like one of my fellow-Temps, then I'm sure I'd be disappointed at my actual job. Let me try to begin at the beginning.
If you're a Graphic Designer who registers with a Graphic Designing Agency, sometime you're going to be called for comp work. It's just about the shittiest job possible in my field. I've had to do it twice before. Two brief gigs where I went home with strained muscles all over my hands, arms, back, and neck. Two brief gigs where I'd get a headache by 2 o'clock every day, from the fumes of the spray-mount and the junk we used to clean up all the excess residue that the spray-mount left. Two brief gigs of cut skin, dull drudgery, and fingers covered in blisters and callouses. Comp work is a full day of cutting out box artwork, sticking it to toyboxes, assembling said boxes, and sometimes placing toys, or pictures of toys, in place. Tedious and difficult, but you do get to see what toys are going to be rolling out sometime soon. We only make limited runs. The real packages for the real toys are made in China, like the toys themselves. So the job I do is done by a machine somewhere in China.
Lots of fun, let me tell you.
But I could take it. I could do it, and do it pretty well. Most Temps in those gigs would last a day or two, I stuck it out for the full two weeks each time. Six months of it? Sure, I know I can do it. The stubborn donkey throws her shoulders against the traces and trudges on. It's easy, so far. Not just because of technical improvements and such . . . I know I'm not just doing a job that needs to be done, I'm very aware that I'm sitting on the lowest rung of the ladder. My legs are dangling down, but my eyes are fixed above me. Package Designer. Package Illustrator. Photographer. Hasbro Interactive Animator. Toy Designer. It would take time, but it would be worth my while to stick around.
My job is to make sure that not only is this department impressed as all hell with me, but that everyone I can talk to has had a chance to find out what a delightfully offbeat character I am. And anything that anybody will teach me about how things work at Hasbro . . . I want to soak it up like a sponge.
Mmm, I'm not making this very coherent. Must still be the denial. Despite the fact that I purchased $40 worth of toys today for about $10, I still don't really believe this is happening. But I should write something, even as fresh as this all is. Somebody out there must want to know what it's like to work at a toy factory.
I can't tell you anything about new toys, of course. I signed an NDA for Lucasfilms on my first day, and another for Hasbro today. My NDA included intellectual property, but that isn't a problem . . . if I have an idea for a toy so fabulous that I think it ought to be made, I'll just find a Hasbro designer to pitch it to.
So, my first day of work. Big stack of paperwork to fill out, of course. And then- nothing. My boss assigned someone to teach me the ropes, but there wasn't anything to do. By the time stuff started flooding in, I took one look at it and was confident I could do it more or less on my own. No training. Yay!
Spray-mount has been replaced. We have these great machines, in three sizes, that basically turns paper into stickers. So the bottom gets all sticky, and we just press it on. No more fumes! No more extra stickiness to remove later! It's beautiful. Easy and fun. The X-acto knives are still a pain in the ass. I blooded my knife today: my wound has a bruise around it that makes it look like I started Hari-Kari on the right side of my belly and changed my mind. But that's all so far, and it was really no big deal. We use scissors a lot, too, since they give us these great precision-cutting scissors. So I balance out the pain by Xactoing with my left hand and scissoring with my right.
I haven't burned myself with my glue gun yet, but I barely use it. Our double-sided tape is really strong.
When I first went to the cafeteria, I was a little disappointed. I'd expect the company that makes Candy Land to have a lollipop tree or a peanut brittle house or something . . . but no, the workers were all clustered around the salad bar. The food's pretty good, and it's cheaper than at NYLIM. Probably farther-from-Boston-ness. But I won't eat there all too often. Even after my bills are caught up and there's a nice (positive) balance in my savings account, I still prefer to bring lunches from home and save money. Besides, I'm still a picky eater, and there's not lots there that looked appealing.
There's a lovely outdoor eating area with benches and a grape arbor and a little lawn . . . I could hold a picnic, if I wanted to. The indoor dining area is huge. One brick wall is covered with really cool, colorful metal sculptures of simplified people. I really like the decor in the building, in general. When they aren't touting their stuff (Scrabble, Monopoly, Jenga, Cooties, My Little Pony, Play-Doh, GI Joe, Playskool, Weebles, Pokemon, Transformers, and lots of other things), they have public art. It's all over the place.
Lack of public art is one of my big reasons for hating Boston, and several other cities. No art, nothing to catch my eye, what's the point of walking around you? Meh. And don't you Bostonians all remind me of the three or four large wind-sculptures and the stuff at Logan, that's been there since the seventies.
The reason I worked for only an hour and a half on Wednesday was because they held an Adobe Creative Suite seminar, and Temps were allowed to go. Almost everything she went over was features I hadn't heard of or barely started using, so it was really exciting. Sometime into the second hour, she said she wished she had stickers to give out, because she'd give me a sticker for how often I raised my hand when she asked questions starting with, "Does anybody use this feature in Photoshop/Illustrator . . . ?" I told her I'd make her a sticker so she could sign it and give it back to me. At the very end, when everybody else had left, I asked if she worked out of the California Adobe office. She said she worked from the New York office, but she did know people . . . I told her to say hi to my brother for me.
Hey, both me and my bro are both working in awesome dreamy wonderful companies! How cool is that?
When I got back from the seminar, there was just half an hour until the whole Creative Services department marched out to go to Dave & Buster's. I guess every Christmas and July, they do some outing where they feed us and we get to do a "team-building" exercise. I cringed at the latter, but it went OK. We were sent on a Scavanger Hunt, and some of the things you had to play games in order to get. So at least we didn't spend the whole time looking for stupid factoids about D & B.
Our team came in third. Then we got released, and I spent a good hour or so spending the remaining balance on the card they gave us. A goodly chunk of it went to breeding and training and racing a new filly named Cloudy Day. I think I have a better handle on the game, though I should whip hard at the beginning of the races, not the end. lediva, any time you want to come down and play, I'd be happy to spend a few hours racing.
Today I only worked a half-day because the Comp crew had outraced the Printers. So this afternoon, they're printing up a whole pile of shit, and tomorrow I'll have a long day.
I hope it's not too long: United Skates of America is only two miles from Hasbro, and I still haven't gone roller skating! Today was my first day biking, and I think I'll not do it two days in a row quite yet.
I still have to get up at the crack of dawn to catch the bus, unless I carpool with ezrarashkae. Hmm, maybe I'll see if she's cool with that.