Problem is, it has to somewhat match my master web page to keep that "brand image" going on. Maybe I'll play around with it today. Maybe I'll even upgrade to Photoshop 6.0 today. I've had this 6.0 version sitting around on CD for about 3 months and haven't done anything with it because I simply haven't had the time. BUT... today is my day off. Envy me.

I volunteered to be editor for our family newsletter over a year ago. I publish quarterly. Problem is it takes up so damn much time to print out 28 6-page copies on my super slow printer that I've decided to throw in the towel. Especially now that my computer is acting all wonky since printing out 5 of the picture pages. I have 23 more picture pages to go. I guess I know what I'll be doing for the rest of the day....

Grrr.

Yesterday was one of those days at the office where I questioned if I was in the right profession. I know having all these "extra" skills like excellent writing and speaking abilities and attention to detail will allow me to quickly climb up that corporate ladder... but I've decided I don't want to be in upper management. And I definitely don't want to stay in my position for the rest of my life because I may very well go insane.

I don't even want to get into typing it all out here because it would run on forever.

I don't know the solution to my problem. Sometimes I just wish I had a menial job where I didn't have to think that much, like typing term papers for college students or being a file clerk....

That would be nice.

Another thing that's been grating on me is that I have a woman, Rachel, in my group that doesn't have any office experience whatsoever. She transferred into our department from the landscape maintenance department; basically, she picked up trash and repaired irrigation systems. And now she's here in our office, in my group! (I didn't hire her, of course. We are in such dire needs of new hires that my boss's boss will basically take anyone who wants to transfer from another department because we're in a hiring freeze. Nice, huh?)

I feel like a terrible heel for even writing this because she really is a nice person, but she really needs some intensive training that I can't give her (I spend about 2 hours with her each day as it is... and it's not enough). Everyone in my department has either a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Landscape Architecture, Soil Science, Architecture, or Engineering; I doubt she has a high school diploma, although she has taken some design-related Extension courses through a local university.

Rachel knew nothing about computers before coming to our office, so she's had to learn a lot. I thought Word was pretty self-explanatory, but one day she asked me how to "slant" (i.e. italicize) a word.

Her writing and verbal skills are absolutely atrocious. The emails that she forwards to me (sent to a Senior-level person in another department, no less, which made me cringe) are filled with sentence fragments, typos, and misspellings. There are even "extra" letters and/or letters that have been accidentally replaced with others. It's obvious she needs an elementary English writing class.

Her verbal skills need work, too. She generally just has an unprofessional demeanor about her. She speaks somewhat slang and she calls women in the office "hon". I am beside myself.

Obviously, it's something I'm going to have to bring up to my boss. I'll have to suggest some training options that hopefully won't be offensive to Rachel. I mean, for hell's sake, our company doesn't offer English 1 courses! Technical Writing, which we do offer, would not be helpful because it won't teach her grammar or punctuation.

I guess I'm also going to have to create a memo that spells out how emails should be formatted, what they should include, and basially that it should be proofread at least twice, etc. It's apparent that Rachel may erroneously think that email can be informal. I'll have to correct her thinking on that.

Did I already mention how much I dislike being a supervisor? All this to deal with and yet I also have lots of deadlines that I fear I'm slipping behind on because I'm spending so much time with Rachel.

Okay, enough ranting for today. Time to get on with printing out the rest of the newsletters. Ugh.