Sorry, I got cut off yesterday by my shift ending. To continue the narrative ...

The printing people harassed me with questions about the Communique -- did I have the pictures? Did I have the PageMaker file? Did I know what was wrong? Did I, did I, did I. Being that I am a work-study, not a professional designer, and that my design skills fall more toward the digital than the print, I had no idea what to tell them. I looked at the proof, and yes, the pictures looked awful, but what could I do? The Political Science Department doesn't give us any sort of professional-quality equipment for putting together the Communique. Even though they upped the print quality in order to use the publication as a promotional tool, they still have us rely upon my rather crappy digital camera for the pictures (and maybe it's me, or maybe the camera's been dropped one time too many, but I think the picture quality has gotten worse lately). I simply couldn't give them anything better than what we gave them, and the printing people didn't seem to get it.

We made several attempts to contact editor Matt (who was in the shower), and once we got a hold of him, we tried to figure out what to do. In the end, we just collected every version of the pictures we had, converted them to the format the printer wanted, and burned them to a CD. I don't know that the pictures will help any, but there it is. It was the best I could do, and if the printing people give me any more crap ... well, I don't know what I'd do. I'm not exactly powerful here. But these people are driving us nuts -- they've already delayed publication for weeks and a great deal of the stuff in the Communique has become outdated.

After that debacle, I decided to go back to the task that brought me to work on Friday in the first place -- fixing the scanner that has not worked from the moment I brought it downstairs. After searching fruitlessly through the support documentation and reinstalling the software again, I decided I would e-mail HP to ask for help. I wrote a long message on the page for a different product (ours wasn't listed) detailing my problems and then clicked the "Submit" button on the form ... and I got a page saying "Page Not Found." I nearly exploded. I went to another form and wrote a new message, saying, "I hate your company, I hate your scanner, and I hate your web site." At least it released some frustration.

So much frustration.