Having a shitty month.....

Well, the roomie got canned about a month ago and the SO and I have been struggling ever since. I can't cover quite all the rent and bills by myself, even though I make $600 a week after taxes. At $2400 a month it's hard to pay everything, and LA is cheaper than Austin.

Right now I'm having a shitty time because my boss is really pissed off at me. I'm in charge of an account's packaging redesign, and it's not going well. Mainly because I am dealing with an outside vendor, of the account's choosing, for the art. My boss is pissed because I was not
communicative enough with the entire team, including production, operations and sales. It's my job, but I didn't realize every delay had to be communicated to everyone. The outside firm gave us deadlines they came up with and didn't meet them....then didn't return my calls. Magically, when my boss calls they pickup the phone. A meeting was called by the VP of Production at the plant this account's products are packaged, asking for status updates on the art. I didn't realize that his portion of the team and the rest of the people on the project were freaking out because they felt like they hadn't been updated. When my boss, who hadn't been invited to said meeting, found out - she flipped. I got my ass chewed the day before the meeting and the day of right
before. I thought this was just a, "hey, here's were we stand meeting" but according to the boss, they were going to eat me alive. She went, explained status, allayed everyone's nervousness and kept me from getting torn apart.

She later told me, people at our comapny only ever really remember the bad things you do, that you can do good work for a long time, but if you make one mistake - that's all they remember. I'm sure that's true of a lot of places.

My boss and I are alot alike, we get along really well but lately I feel like I can't get anything right. She yelled at me today because I misspelled a word in an email to someone inside the company! And....the outside design firm used too many colors in one of the pieces of art they sent to us, but I hadn't noticed. So I got yelled at for that. That one I understand, every color you add over 6 to a package design, forces the printing cost to skyrocket. I have a very complicated project going on for all accounts that involves 2 pieces of verbage for each label, not all labels get both. I confused the two labeling issues two time in the past two days, so I got fussed at twice for that.

When I rush, I make mistakes. It's as simple as that. Lately, everything has been a rush. Maybe I wasn't ready to head up a redesign project by myself yet. Well, okay...definitely not ready if my boss had to step in. I can handle all the day to day projects with no problem, but the redesigns have put me over the top.

She's stressed because she has significantly larger redesigns in progress and is having problems with both of them. I don't know if it's just me or I'm just aggrevating the situation and that's pissing her off.

I'm just scared I'm going to get fired. I'm always scared of that, just because I'm afraid that I'm not good enough. But this time, I can't afford to get fired. I need every penny I'm making. We are 2 weeks late with rent, but our land lord is cool. If I lost my job, I couldn't pay rent next month. What the hell!

I'm probably just being a drama queen anyway. When I talked to my boss a few months ago about the possibility of being fired, she said I would be warned if it was going to happen. I know she wouldn't lie. But I have totally lost my confidence in what I'm doing. Now I feel like I have to check everything with her, no matter how minor.

This sucks.

On the upside, the SO's working on his demo reel. He talked to a software dealer this week who said he could probably pick up work going to user's groups meetings and getting to know people. Showing he could at least talk intelligently about the subject would help a lot. He's
been working with 3D art for over 10 years now. He knows what he's doing, that shouldn't be hard.