``...First, it was Xerox you were thinking of, not Zenith. You were at the right end of the alphabet though!'' Colin B
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God, that takes me back. The first page layout program I ever tried to use was Xerox, Ventura Publisher. It came with graphic interface that had to be installed first. Naturally M$ and Intel had an upper memory address limit and not enough motherboard sockets to install sufficient memory. So the solution was a memory board about 12'' long. It cost something about four hundred dollars for a giant 2MB. Then there was a autoexec.bat + sys.com utility to access this memory for programs like Ventura, then there was a special bit-map font set, and another video adapter to install, and a font alias to turn on. And then about 60% of the time, I forgot some little trick or other and Ventura would crash MS-DOS 3.3 to 5.0 ('87-90'), blah, blah, blah.
Fuck was that bullshit. And on top of that crap, none of these versions of DOS had laser printer drivers so I had to go find drivers and be extra-special careful to get those to work and manually install an Adobe font set.
And by that time M$ finally got around to upgrading Windows to 3.0 with more memory hassles, meanwhile Xerox dropped their support for Ventura and it was sold to somebody else. I finally switched to some early version of Quark, which had a whole other bullshit routine of manually configuring the Win3.x boot file with the names of the fucking fonts and their specs so the stupid M$uck print driver would work. Of course crashes were synonymous with both positions of the on/off switch. At one point Adobe Illustrator crashed the system just by clicking the icon. Adobe graciously acknowledge the problem and then charged a fifty dollar fee for the `upgrade', which was really just a bug fix on their retail version out of the box.
All the while the smug Mac boys were tooling along with their graphics. But the underlying truth was my Mac buddies in graphic design were making less than I was in wheelchair repair. Ah, and the gatekeepers that Kelley keeps on about were hyperactive in the graphics industry. If you didn't show a portfolio done on a Mac, you were fucking dead meat wasting oh so precious time of the hard core HR bitch in trendy black, about twenty-five, pierced belly button that showed with tattoos running up her leg---a recent graduate of the SF Academy of Art in Graphic Design, kiss my ass honey. You couldn't draw your way out of paper bag.
But hey, I was cool. I never flinched, I always smiled and so forth and so on. God I came to hate it. I wasn't qualified to change prices on car ads in the dailies, which was the bottom end production job in that era. My last few downtown agency interviews I showed up in my climbing shorts with holes in them smoking in the elevator. I put my cigarette out in the fucking potted plant in the lobby and walked straight into the cubicals, found the first person I could with an Xacto knife and a glue stick and asked where the portfolio person was. Screw it. A cold call, was a cold call, and I wasn't getting through the door any other way.
Meanwhile Adobe was selling their full font catalog (industry standard) for only two thousand dollars! Quark refused to issue nominal upgrade pricing and only gave a discount off the full retail for their endless patches, while Photoshop and Illustrator charged about a hundred bucks per upgrade issued on a three to six month cycle (not guaranteed to work out of the box) for their bug fixes, while big M$uck stalled out issuing Win95.
Of course Win95 necessitated a whole new cycle of graphic upgrades. My by now aging laser printer finally worked with the M$uck supplied print drivers and there were enough free downloadable font sets that actually matched the printer font sets (as long as you manually de-selected True-Type). Whoopy fucking dew. Of course the printer was by then obsolete, another three thousand five hundred dollars down the drain since the bottom fell out of the laser printer market and the original manufacturer had gone bankrupt.
After five or six years of playing this game, I just gave up. I was spending thousands of dollars a year and getting nowhere. My only solace was the DotCom bust when a lot of these motherfuckers including their tattoos ate shit and died. Fucking right on.
I developed an attitude about capital that was so violent I used to dream about putting a bullet in their fucking heads and kicking their corpse out a ten story window. Let the Fire Dept scrap their face off the pavement. Toward the end, it was obvious I wasn't suited to this career change. Of course I was in my fifties and the silly jerks I tried so desperately to make comfortable in interviews were my kid's age.
I suspect I didn't get these stupid low paying jobs because I scared these little jerks no matter how obsequious, gentle, and nice I made myself. Of course my turkey neck, bald head, bulging biceps, cut quads, and steel string like ripples over my arms didn't help at all. Well, not to mention the shadow that fell over their faces as they saw an MFA from Berkeley in 1969 on the back pages of the resume. A life time of manual labor, rock climbing, and cycling made me look like a fire breathing dead on killer. They must have realized calling security was not an option since it was evident they would long dead, strangled bare handed by their scrawny geek necks, by the time the nine dollar an hour idiot in the lobby got up to their floor. It seemed like bad luck or a presentiment of things to come when about that time there were a series of news stories of employees going postal.
Ah, those were the days...
CG