Being a production manager sucks

Bad Choices Make Good Stories: Going to New York, Chapter 8

“You are part of the rat race because you are letting them treat you like a rat. This is the modern definition of a slave.”

Saurabh Sharma

I landed a job in the graphic department of a weekly newspaper in Brooklyn. At first I had to create the ads for local advertisers. The old lady who owned the newspaper liked my work, and after just a few weeks I was promoted to production manager. 

I was now in charge of the entire newspaper. I was the one who determined how many pages each issue had, how many copies to print, what the newspaper looked like, and where each article and advertisement went on each page.

It was another job I had gotten by pretending to know their software, even though I didn't. I had to learn everything on the fly, without letting anyone know that I had no idea what I was doing.

After a few weeks, I was pretty good at my job and had made several improvements to the paper.

Before I took over, the previous production manager still had cut and paste boards, where each page was literally being glued together with snippets of text on paper strips. And photos still had to be developed in a dark room.

Like we were a bunch of savages or something.