Man at Work

Many a time in a blog post I've blurted out about how busy I sometimes get at the office. Well here it is again, for the last several weeks it's not just being overly busy but has become much more intense as well. Ever since I've had this job every day seems to fly by, mostly because I enjoy what I do and generally there's a lot of it to do. Doing graphic design within an environmental engineering firm encompasses everything from graphs and charts in reports to covers for project proposals. PowerPoint slide shows and visuals for company sponsored events, the list goes on. Co-workers are actually my "clients", they email, call or drop by my cube for a variety of reasons some of which are beyond producing graphics for their project or proposal, such as removing the date stamp from a photograph, making changes or extracting things from PDF files, sign for a job site, oversized phone list for older eyes. So besides being busy for 23 years I find it hard to be bored but the amount of work I've seen over these last few weeks has been cranked up several notches. The real problem that contributes to the intensity is the effect it has on being creative, adding just the right touch to something that make a visual more effective. I find myself just churning out basic stuff that meets the need, just not as good as it should be. A couple of weeks ago I had my annual review, it was a good one. My manager (not a graphics person) every year is looking for ways of challenging me since as a senior graphic designer I'm at the end of my career path in the company. This is not a problem for me as the items I mentioned near the beginning of this post are what drives me - well that and a paycheck, sick and vacation time come in handy too. He tries hard to come up with things for me to do over the next year though it usually ends up with me being too busy to accomplish those ideas. Regardless I’ve been told I’m getting a raise and that I’m presently working at the increased amount. I’ll figure it out when I get my pay stub.