In a conversation with the Possuman yesterday, asked me what exactly I do for a living and I realized I haven't really delved into that very much.

Basically, I do grunt work for a small advertising/PR firm. Although we're a small company, we have some pretty big (fortune 500) clients, primarily in the floor covering industry.

Now, when I say grunt work, that's only in a computer sense. I have a printing/pre-press background, so one of my primary functions is getting files ready for print. I also do a little color correction, which is amazing to me still because I get stuck with doing about half our color correction although I'm not that good at it (I fake it) and we have another guy here who is better qualified to do it.

My other main task here is image manipulation. All of our designers can do image manipulation to a greater or lesser extent, but I probably do the bulk of it. The kind of stuff I do varies pretty wildly, from changing the flooring in a room photograph (that's kind of a specialized thing in this area) to removing people from photos and adding people to photos. I actually do a lot more than that, but this is the gist of what I do.

Another big project that I (we, because I have help, but I'm the main worker bee) is a 400+ page catalog for a rug manufacturer. This critter is pretty much my baby. We update it twice a year and it's a bear. When we did the first one, I just about lived at the office seven days a week for four months (my lovely bride was unhappy with me because we'd only been married two months when I started that project). It's a coffee table sized book showing the client's entire product line. I thought they were nuts at first, but I've got to say it looks impressive. You know that's got to be a great sales tool for these guys to go out to their buyers with (I can picture some sales guy ploppin' this thing on the counter and saying "well, our competitors have some nice stuff, but look at our product line"). Most of the floor covering industry relies on brochures and booklets, so this little jewel sets them apart in a big way.

We're pretty much a Mac shop (web stuff excepted), still clinging to OS 9.2... I tend to be the guinea pig around here and I'm still a bit leery of OS X. I may jump to it at home, just to get a feel for it. I dislike having to troubleshoot computer problems with limited knowledge and I KNOW that we'll have problems when we make the move. Most of the printers we deal with are still running OS 9 and are happy with the "if it ain't broke don't monkey with it" school of thought, so there's really no need for us to make the switch right now.

So, that's how I spend my weekdays... except in the summer, when I'm on a tractor half the time.

Although I doubt the need to point this out (because of the nonsense l write here), I don't write copy.