Idiocy is contagious

OK, anyone who's been reading my LJ for a while knows that I work for a magazine publisher. From time to time, said magazine publisher puts out "special issues," or one-offs. (Sometimes they're not even one-offs, really...they're sort of testbeds to see whether a particular title will sell or not so they know whether to turn it into a regular magazine.) Usually they bring in freelancers to do the art direction, since the Powers That Be seem to think that our regular art directors can't handle the extra work. (Somehow it's always no problem that the regular copy editor [me] and managing editor have to take on the extra work, but whatever.) Invariably these freelancers have turned out to be walking piles of dog shit, and the current incarnation is no exception. OK, in this case, he's actually a very good designer, but he can't work with our image-processing system, has repeatedly bagged on said system, and has made it sound as if all the problems he's had were due to our cumbersome workflow processes. Whatever. The sad part is that he was brought in by the editorial director, so he's bulletproof...so much so that they've made this dork the new group art director who's supposed to handle the redesign of a bunch of magazines. If he were only doing design, I wouldn't care so much, but he's ignored every bit of advice that the M.E. and I have given him on workflow, so that now that it's time to actually ship the magazine, NONE of the images have been processed, and the files he's created don't comply with the standards our processing facility has laid down. Even if he gets his act together enough to get things out the door, they're going to get kicked back to him because images weren't named correctly, or layouts weren't paginated correctly, etc., etc. According to the M.E., the moron hasn't even converted the image files from RGB to CMYK, which any first-year graphic design student knows you HAVE to do when you're working with a four-color printing process.

The kicker to all this is that the clueless wonder is flying back to England for the holidays on Thursday, so he's going to leave a big ol' pile of steaming shit for some poor shmoe to deal with. Thank God it won't be me -- once I've signed off on a layout, I'm done. And the M.E. has already told one of her higher-ups that she's not taking it on the chin for this guy -- she already put in 12-hour days getting the last "special issue" out the door, and she's not doing it again, especially for a rag she couldn't care less about. (The last special issue had as an editor one of the guys on staff whom we dearly love, so we all sort of pulled together to make it happen for his sake.)

All of this leads me to wonder who's going to take the fall for this one. I'm just glad I'm far enough down on the food chain that it won't be me. I also wonder what sadistic bastards in our production department decided that starting up a new magazine right before the holidays was a good idea. I'd say it was a fluke, but this is the THIRD time in my career in magazine publishing that I've had to do a start-up right before or during the holidays. It sucks.

Bah, humbug.

Oh, and it's also FREEZING here. Literally. With the cold north wind that's blowing straight down off the mountains, the wind chill is putting the temperature in my town at just below freezing. (I actually like it...at least it feels like Christmas...but I just wanted to put it out there so everyone would know it's not always 80 degrees around here.)

Thank God we bought more firewood yesterday...we can have a cozy fire and watch Bad Santa or something. Yeah, that'll put me in the holiday mood. :-P