Idiocy personified
Okay, so I run a magazine. I have technical skills and speak a lingo that I expect fellow publishing-type people to understand. I communicate with technical people and laypeople equally well. However, I encountered a real fuckwit in my field who couldn’t even understand the techie-speak, so I dumbed it down and still don’t understand why the hell she can’t accommodate my request.
I purchased the rights to a photo that ran in a local newspaper (printed on newsprint — hold that thought; it comes in handy later). An important person in my organization was seen hanging out with Sen. John Kerry. I called this “special editor” (and boy is she special) and asked her to FTP a TIF in CMYK my way. I paid $50 for this request and waited four days for this.
So I get an e-mail with a TIF in RGB. No big deal; I can fix that. But what the dumb broad did was scan the photo FROM THE NEWSPRINT and e-mail it to me. I could have done THAT myself! As if THAT weren’t bad enough, there is a ton of text on the photo, telling their readers to see the related story in whatever section on whatever page. They also had the cutline placed on the photo instead of separately, under it. *sigh*
So I contacted this genius today to say apparently we had a misunderstanding and that I wanted the TIF of the ACTUAL PHOTO FROM THE LAYOUT. And she has tried valiantly to e-mail this humongous file to me (hence why I wanted it FTP’d). And when I told her that I get messages that the attachment gets stripped because it’s too fucking big to e-mail, well, she e-mailed it again. Same problem.
So now I have her trying to find out if anyone has an FTP program she can use — I am willing to give her my FTP login information so she can dump it directly onto my server. Apparently this is rocket science, because she’s stumped. I could, of course, request that she burn a CD and mail it to me, but I’ve got deadlines and I can’t keep waiting for her to get it together. I can’t believe I had to pay for this aggravation and I STILL don’t have the fucking photo in-hand!