What an insane few days.

I have to vent about this.

My firm is having a client party tonight at this restaurant called "Starters". Apprently, it's a very techy place, and they've got something like 100 video monitors all over the place. Someone in my office had the brilliant idea of putting various screenshots on the monitors while our party is going on. No problem, right? Just create a powerpoint presentation and give it to the resaturant to play.

Nope.

I called the restaurant, and apparently, their system can only play DVDs, not CDs. Fine. I have a DVD burner on my laptop, so I'll just put our frames onto a DVD as JPEGs and give it to them.

Nope.

The DVD needs to be independent; it has to play like it's own movie. Fine. My laptop has DVD movie creating software, I'll just create the movie.

I left my office at 2:30 yesterday afternoon to fetch the laptop from Donovan at his office. I theorized that I could pick it up, run home, download and install the software that I needed, create the slides, and be back in my office by 4 or 4:30.

Nope.

I had to create the slides from other people's poorly thrown together images, which took fooooooooooreeeeeeeeeeever. I had to cancel my chirpractor appointment, never made it back to my office, and finally finished the slides by 6pm.

This morning, I made a few more changes, then one of the (jerkier) attorneys suggested that a pic of one of the other attorneys in one of the slides didn't look that good. Fine. We have a digital camera in the office, so one of the other girls took his picture. Well, it was the worst picture I've seen in a long time, so I wanted to take another one myself. The unphotogenic attorney gave me major attitude, which made me incredibly angry. I mean, I was doing this whole thing for the firm on my own time, spending more energy than anyone else and he couldn't even be polite.

I was obviously upset when I went back to my cube, defeated, so two of the really nice lady attorneys tried to make me feel better and told me they thought the work I'd done looked really great. One even said she wanted to keep an invitation I'd previously designed because she thought it looked so nice. :) I finally took a much better picture of the attorney and added it to that slide.

Well, all of this took about 10 man hours, much more than it should have. I learned that next time a problem presents itself, I shouldn't try to expend extra effort for my stupid office. All this work, really under a particularly jerky attorney, and after I gave him the finished DVD, all he said was, "It looks good." I really wanted to punch him in the head.

Now I've got to put on some kind of happy face and socialize not only with the attorneys at my office whom I loathe right now, but also with vendors and clients who I've only prentended to like over the phone thus far. The party is two hours long - I'm so going late and leaving early.