Brian told me the other day he likes all the pictures I put up here, and I guess posting pics of address books, money orders, and gargantuan shredders is a wee bit out of the ordinary.
I’ve always needed visual aids, maybe because my parents (along with other assorted family members) are artists. This became a sort of inside joke when I held my one and only job as a supervisor.
/cue the flashback music/
It was my freshman year of college, and in the fall I worked as a production assistant on The Oberlin Review, the weekly student newspaper. I doubt this position even exists anymore, but I liked it. We laid out the paper—stories, headlines, photos, ads, and all—using wax, exacto knives, light boxes, and pretty blue non-photo-repro pens. I believe they switched to PageMaker the very next year. But we were old school.
Anyway, in spring I was promoted to production manager (actually I think nobody else wanted to do it), which meant another girl and I shared the responsibility of supervising the production workers. Now, the student who’d been my production manager the previous semester had an intimidating way of communicating her expectations to the staff.
I’ve always needed visual aids, maybe because my parents (along with other assorted family members) are artists. This became a sort of inside joke when I held my one and only job as a supervisor.
/cue the flashback music/
It was my freshman year of college, and in the fall I worked as a production assistant on The Oberlin Review, the weekly student newspaper. I doubt this position even exists anymore, but I liked it. We laid out the paper—stories, headlines, photos, ads, and all—using wax, exacto knives, light boxes, and pretty blue non-photo-repro pens. I believe they switched to PageMaker the very next year. But we were old school.
Anyway, in spring I was promoted to production manager (actually I think nobody else wanted to do it), which meant another girl and I shared the responsibility of supervising the production workers. Now, the student who’d been my production manager the previous semester had an intimidating way of communicating her expectations to the staff.
The paper came out on Friday, and she met with us on Saturday. The meetings consisted of her scrutinizing the paper page by page, picking out every orphan, widow, crooked line of text, poorly cropped photo, misaligned column, unevenly spaced block of text, and other assorted egregious errors. Then she’d bark, “Who the $&#@ laid out this page?! It looks like %#^*!” We all sat cowed in utter terror, holding our breath while she gave us our upbraiding and told us the right way to do things. (She was scary as hell but ended up being one of my closest friends from Oberlin.)
Anyway. If you knew me, you’d know I had no chance of mimicking her leadership style. I am a huge conflict avoider. At 18, I was even meeker and wishy-washier than I am now. So when I needed to communicate to my staff the right and wrong way to lay out the paper, I relied on the ultimate go-between: the visual aid.
I made up cute little pictures and posted them all over our work area. I started to get a reputation among the ‘real’ editors in the front offices. More than one person wondered whether I was capable of expressing myself without the use of visual aids. To this day, I’m still not sure, but I’m not going to risk it and try to do without them.
Since I’m on such a tangent today anyway, I will give you a bonus visual aid that has nothing to do with anything (or maybe everything to do with everything) from Daniel Kolak’s In Search of God: The Language and Logic of Belief. Look, a visual aid depicting Pascal’s Wager. Too fun!
Anyway. If you knew me, you’d know I had no chance of mimicking her leadership style. I am a huge conflict avoider. At 18, I was even meeker and wishy-washier than I am now. So when I needed to communicate to my staff the right and wrong way to lay out the paper, I relied on the ultimate go-between: the visual aid.
I made up cute little pictures and posted them all over our work area. I started to get a reputation among the ‘real’ editors in the front offices. More than one person wondered whether I was capable of expressing myself without the use of visual aids. To this day, I’m still not sure, but I’m not going to risk it and try to do without them.
Since I’m on such a tangent today anyway, I will give you a bonus visual aid that has nothing to do with anything (or maybe everything to do with everything) from Daniel Kolak’s In Search of God: The Language and Logic of Belief. Look, a visual aid depicting Pascal’s Wager. Too fun!
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