Oh Boy, Oh Boy - A Blather on Work

Today was finally the type of day at work where I feel the need to write about said day. Nothing over the top happened, but in an attempt to purge myself of the day's happenings, I shall feel better and move on with life and maybe do some homework.

HA! Homework, yeah right!

Anyway, the day. There was a most terrible snow/rain/sleet storm today, which meant that half of the staff was not in - both writing and designing staffs were running at half capacity, which meant that some projects were being juggled to compensate for the upcoming deadlines. Now that I'm on my school schedule, I come in every other day, which means that something I may have worked on will no longer be how I've left it on the previous day, so that means catching up or proceeding to the next part of the project (or completely redoing another someone else's work.)

So - last week, all the writers had to create transcripts of staff interviews to give the design staff a complete look, so they could take clips and make them into a video. We had to transcribe the interviews exactly as they happened, so every uh, um, sooo, er and et cetera (some guy actually said et cetera *face plant*) had to be in the transcript so the AV group could edit it out.

My God, the way some people speak.

On Monday, I had some time left at the end of the day, so I was assigned to start pulling some of the sound bytes from those transcripts and put them together according to what topics were being spoken about. I had pulled all of the quote, scratched out all of the ums and other unnecessary words with track changes (which is the best editing tool ever!) and even went through the audio tracks, scrubbed the time and wrote down exactly when in the audio track the line would be pulled from and when it ended - seemed to make the most sense, since the AV guys wouldn't have the time to search the tracks for themselves, so hey - save them the trouble, right? Right. I managed to finish one, which was all well and good.

Today, I found out that the writer I normally work with took care of doing the rest. I was literally cursing his name throughout the entire project. There were no timestamps; what he considered to be the best way to find the sounds bytes were actually listed as finding them in the transcript text (which did not match up when trying to find them in the audios), and he did not edit out all of the uhs, ums and such, to my disappointment, and he did not go through the other audio tracks and notice that there were some uhs and ums that did not placed in the transcripts. Which meant, oh joy, that I had to go through and find all of these files myself and try to find the damn sound bytes, mark down their times, find all the words that weren't supposed to be in there just so I could cross them out in the final slate sheet, and add the designer's edits to the slate anyway.

Granted, if the writer had not had all the sound bytes already listed, I'd have to do them myself, but going through and completely altering preexisting work that I didn't do was just grinding. I sat at my desk going, "WTF?! This makes NO SENSE!" for most of the day, but was reminded by my editor that the writer came from a print based background and still can't figure out all of this multimedia stuff yet. So, she had a point, and I thought that I shouldn't get too teed-off about it, since I can understand the multimedia work and how it should be presented for other people to work with. It's the techno-savvy generation gap. The designer I worked with loved what I did, and it made work easier for the AV guy to work with - so that was cool. It was worth all the readjustments that had to be done, and I like to do this kind of stuff at work anyway.

However, I had to do all this to help make sure that the story could run this Friday. If the story didn't run, I had to have another story ready to fill its place, which is what I had to finish up after I had completed the transcribing project. BAAAAAAAH! I had started working on the alternate story on Monday and roughed it out to a sort of story, and when I got it today, there were so many edits that I felt that it should belong to the person that edited it, since I felt weird attaching my name to it when half the stuff I put in was stuff I didn't write. My editor talked me down from that, and had me take the two most recent drafts of edits and adjust them up, and finish the piece on my own - which was pretty cool, I guess. At least it got done it can get finished up by Friday, whatever story goes in, that is.

The first day I had to stay late to work on projects. I have truly joined the working world!