Really, just how shitty can company equipment get? How far can a company stretch it’s invested dollar by insisting that a monitor eight years old and a computer five years its senior can really work. How can some people sit back and drink Crystal while saving a Word document because a challenge in and of itself. Trust me, being a copywriter I’ve seen the worse a company has to offer and believe it or not, I’ve been treated to the delicacies of working on computers with floppy drives… and I mean the original floppy drives. Computers media people scoff at and people in traffic go “dang bitch!”. Computers you could sell as antiques, relics or even donate for the museum of technological history.
And I’m not the only one. I’ve seen artists have to work with computers that have been obsolete since I got out of college... Hell maybe when I got INTO college. I’m talking bad. And it’s not just one agency, there are quite a few chumpchanging agencies out there insisting that layouts can probably be prepared in Windows 95’s Microsoft Paint just because it came bundled with the computers a decade ago. I once went through four computers in 4 months and I swear the combined memory of two of them wouldn’t get to 1 GB. Friggin Word would quit on me if I opened more than two documents (there are witnesses). And color screens? HAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA… good one. I’m a copywriter, why in the hell would I need any type of color screen. It’s not like I could ever look for a picture, browse through cliparts or have any kind of artistic merit to my name. Hell I write words. I’m totally foreign to the concept of color, pantones, and art in general.
But what about you guys? What medieval technological torture devices have you been subjected to? What crappy hardware has been passed down to you like some medieval rite of passage?
7 comments:
Ha-ha. Floppy disks. I remember those. I use to use those on my WANG computer...
I had a boss who insisted on keeping his SyQuest collection, just in case he needed it. Jesus.
We both know that com-pu-ters are considered a luxury for us copywriters. I mean, we can do our jobs just as easily on a typewriter, right? Or we could always revert to a pencil and the backside of used printer paper... I mean, they're JUST words.
Hell, I technically can do my job with a sharp stick and a freaking clay tablet.
At least I can rest assured knowing that my nephew's first grade class is learning the alphabet on dual core G5's... because that makes complete sense.
I actually had to use a typewriter a few weeks ago while visiting a former client. That sucked. And I also walked into an office that still had the box mufflers that once housed noisy dot-matrix printers. Oh, and I still have an OkiData box that I use to store my porn VHS tapes!
-We store our agency backup con "dats"
-95% of our PC's have Windows 2000
-Still using some G4's (one of them operates with a hamster inside)
Hey Anoni... are you by any chance talking about my G4? with the Hamster inside??? LOL Ok OK...I shouldn't complain....the G4 actually works well but when I first started working I was given the crappiest G3 they had in the whole agency. It would erase or parcially erase my jobs including a newsletter that took me a week to made the day before the deadline. By the way all the other artists have G5...:(
G3's? G4's? I used to work in a PC converted into a MAC that ran on OS 8 and that was just a year ago. I've worked on power Macs and yes I was even forced to work with pen and paper once limiting my computer contact to when the artist would allow me to sit and write. Funny stuff since crashing systems was a natural thing.
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