Grrrr aargh

I feel rough today – sore throat, ulcers, aching bones and stomach cramps. Just to add the icing on the cherry (as Susie from Big Brother put it), today has been a Dudley day and a busy one to boot.

A mail merge that went from being a simple mail shot of the new customer database to needing logos and addresses (because we don’t have the new headed stationery yet) and a scanned in signature from the FD because she didn’t want to sign two thousand letters. The only way to scan the signature was to use the scanner/printer thingy to email the image to myself, and that would have been straight forward if people didn’t keep trying to print out power point presentations at the same time.

The next task was finding a suitable printer to print it on. The colour printer in accounts was too slow, and the image looked a bit naff and fuzzy. The next choice was the big Ricoh printer in the print room upstairs. I sent a couple of test sheets and trotted upstairs to find that they had jammed. I spent a couple of minutes trying to work out the incomprehensible unjamming illustrations on the printer door before asking for help.

“Oh, this printer’s rubbish –  it never works properly and we’re waiting for a replacement”

Why is it still on the network then? Am I supposed to know intuitively that it’s a waste of time using it? The last resort was the marketing printer, which proved to be working and of the required quality to do the job. Sorted.

In the afternoon, I tried to have a meeting with the contracts manager to sort out her requirements for (yet another bloody) invoicing system for the new company’s site visit expenses. We were interrupted at least half a dozen times with journals for me to create, a purchase ordering problem to look at, and handover questions for the manager to answer. Strewth.

I didn’t leave the office until nearly five, so all thoughts of avoiding the heavy traffic through the M6 roadworks (in place for the next six months, fact fans) went out the window. My boss gave me a letter with news of my annual pay rise in it. Bear in mind that I’ve worked my socks off over the last couple of months, regularly putting in extra time (48 hours last week) so I was just slightly miffed to see that I’ve got a whopping 2%.

Whoopee. Big fat hairy deal. Colour me not impressed.