Over-worked and over-worked

Work has been hard of late. I'm not used to chasing deadlines on projects of this sort of magnitude, I'm used to a fair mix of projects ranging from the epic (like all the ones I do these days it seems) to the mini. This meant it felt like you accomplished something during a day by clearing your place of all the little things. Now there are no 'little things' and only a constant slog toward a short-term goal that by the time you're don all you can muster is vague relief before plunging headlong into the next thing. Of course, this being design, often the project you've completed rises up to demand attention once more and then you have to juggle that with all the new projects.

This way of working has been slowly wearing me down over the past few months since I can't keep up this pace unabated for so little reward. Most of what we do is free pitches, which 80% of the time means your work is discarded. Then if the client chooses it, they often proceed to pull it apart until it bears only passing resemblance of your original creation. There's no work-satisfaction payoff, plus I'm working harder and for longer hours than I ever have in my life as yet.

My sole consolation is that I as least have coworkers now, even if they are a bit of a mixed bag and my creative director can be moodier than a 15-year old girl, and the senior designer is a hypercondriac with deep-seated issues and ADD. Half the time the staff seem to add to the stress and tension rather than providing a vent for it. No-one here will take the blame for anything and it results in so much bitchiness with everyone trying to play the naming game. Us three in the design department mostly try to keep our heads down, but every-so-often we still need to defend our honor, especially against DTP who're ready to blame everything on us 'useless designers'.

The net result has meant not much time to blog really. So quicky: I've graded to orange in Jitsu, I'm going to physio a lot to recover from the injuries I got before and during the grading, I've passed all my PR assignments and I'm failing to study for the exam in January, I've started writing a LARP with Annick which promises to be lots of fun, Tony and I invested in a rather nice microwave on the weekend - our first homeware purchase, I'm aiming to start gym on Monday and as implied by the homeware purchase, Tony and I are still going strong, even if he manages to be a total bitch to half my friends. Sigh.