Work
Okay here comes one of the promised updates.... sorry I wrote so much!
The year is winding down, which means work is picking up.
I live in an area of Florida which is heavily populated by snowbirds in the winter, and during the summer months some businesses in the area can seriously just grind to a halt.
What is a snowbird you ask?
For those of you lucky enough to not even know what a snowbird is I'll explain. A snowbird is a person whom migrates with the weather, much like birds who go north for the summer, and south for the winter, following the ideal weather. Most snowbirds tend to be elderly.
So these elderly folk live up north usually from April or May until October or November, when they literally flock back to Florida and stay through out the winter. This is not usually a gradual migration, you can pretty much tell the exact moment when they've all returned because the entire IQ of the driving population drops by about 100 points. Traffic becomes slow, and dangerous. And I could go on to many of the other side effects of snowbird season, but well... we don't have all day.
My friend Gabe did a great editorial cartoon for our paper which sums up the snowbird a bit. And yes we had angry snowbirds calling in to complain about the cartoon, because complaining is one of their many hobbies, along with bingo.
What does this have to do with my work? Well this town caters to these people, and they bring in a lot of business, so businesses like to advertise more, which means, since I work at a newspaper, as a graphic designer for advertising, we suddenly get flooded with more ads.
Throw in the holidays, and all the extra holiday sections our paper produces, and that ups the ad count even more.
And as an added bonus, this time of the year seems to be the best time for us to lose employees for one reason or another... so once again this year we are severely understaffed. So in order to get all the ads done, which absolutely has to be done since ads = income for a newspaper, the staff that is around ends up shouldering overtime. A LOT of overtime.
Last year around November, pretty much our entire staff worked 30 days straight with no time off, usually 12-16 hour days, not bothering to take any breaks during the day. It nearly killed us all! :P
Starting the middle of September, we've started to get into this overtime cycle. Most of us have already started giving up days off, and even then we've begun the process of skipping lunch breaks and tacking extra hours onto our day.
So this is one reason I've been too pre-occupied to update here. :)
The year is winding down, which means work is picking up.
I live in an area of Florida which is heavily populated by snowbirds in the winter, and during the summer months some businesses in the area can seriously just grind to a halt.
What is a snowbird you ask?
For those of you lucky enough to not even know what a snowbird is I'll explain. A snowbird is a person whom migrates with the weather, much like birds who go north for the summer, and south for the winter, following the ideal weather. Most snowbirds tend to be elderly.
So these elderly folk live up north usually from April or May until October or November, when they literally flock back to Florida and stay through out the winter. This is not usually a gradual migration, you can pretty much tell the exact moment when they've all returned because the entire IQ of the driving population drops by about 100 points. Traffic becomes slow, and dangerous. And I could go on to many of the other side effects of snowbird season, but well... we don't have all day.
My friend Gabe did a great editorial cartoon for our paper which sums up the snowbird a bit. And yes we had angry snowbirds calling in to complain about the cartoon, because complaining is one of their many hobbies, along with bingo.
What does this have to do with my work? Well this town caters to these people, and they bring in a lot of business, so businesses like to advertise more, which means, since I work at a newspaper, as a graphic designer for advertising, we suddenly get flooded with more ads.
Throw in the holidays, and all the extra holiday sections our paper produces, and that ups the ad count even more.
And as an added bonus, this time of the year seems to be the best time for us to lose employees for one reason or another... so once again this year we are severely understaffed. So in order to get all the ads done, which absolutely has to be done since ads = income for a newspaper, the staff that is around ends up shouldering overtime. A LOT of overtime.
Last year around November, pretty much our entire staff worked 30 days straight with no time off, usually 12-16 hour days, not bothering to take any breaks during the day. It nearly killed us all! :P
Starting the middle of September, we've started to get into this overtime cycle. Most of us have already started giving up days off, and even then we've begun the process of skipping lunch breaks and tacking extra hours onto our day.
So this is one reason I've been too pre-occupied to update here. :)
Labels: Life.
posted by Silver at
1:47 PM
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