My boss just left for the day. He was looking flushed and when I asked if he was all right he admitted that he was feeling a little ill… In some ways it’s like I sent him home to recover. An odd feeling.
On the other hand, I feel a bit worried that I may be responsible for his illness. I thought that my weekend of intestinal distress may have been food related, but it’s possible that it was something else. Something contagious.
I hope not. It’s quiet now, but it’s going to be busy soon.
I’ve got a client bringing by the details on a recognition award that they want to present tonight. It’s kind of short notice, but that’s the way a lot of design work gets done. Someone needs an official looking diploma or a certificate of appreciation done in twenty minutes, so you open up Illustrator, find a nice gaudy font, slap on the whatever official seal the marketing department says you need, and print it up. Then, next year, when they need half a dozen more, you just go to the archives and rewrite the text on the old version. Suddenly the rush job has become the official version.
My boss was telling me about being in a doctor’s office and seeing a plaque on the wall that he’d designed twelve years ago. If I want to, I could wander down the hall and see a logo I designed sewn into the white lab coats that some of the docs wear. It’s a strange feeling. And it makes you realize just how much power an unscrupulous graphic artist could wield… Why, we could print out parking tickets by the score! Or stationary and letterhead for people that don’t exist! We could commit massive crimes of forgery and fraud!
Or at least we could if we weren’t so busy infecting our co-workers with some kind of mild flu. Being Typhoid Matt is a full time occupation. I don’t have time for fraud…