From what I hear there's always a battle between the art department and the sales department, in publishing. Technically no one is higher up then the other, and we're supposed to be working together. The sales team bring in the ads, and we build them. If there was no sales team there are no ads. But if there is no art team, there is no ad to put in the paper.

Trouble is, no matter what industry you're in, a salesperson is a salesperson. You like them in their presence but once you walk away you can't help but feel you were sold something. Most of the time it's their personality. It's a very egotistical sort of position, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. You can't stick someone with low self-esteem to go in and sell something. It'll never happen. They'll be eaten alive.

But in my office D* is a completely different story. I love her as a person but as a co-worker she's a nightmare to work with. She's always late on deadlines, which is a major no-no in publishing... a WEEKLY publishing company. We are forever doing things last minute because of her. She's on personal calls ALL DAY. Her "meetings" are really shopping sprees at the local TJ Max. It's a running joke that whenever we can't find her we should call the TJ Max and have her paged. The boss is lucky if he gets a solid 3 hours of work out of her.

She missed a meeting with a client one time, to go to the local Greek festival. What happened? Nothing. Boss just shrugged and said it happens sometimes. My department didn't respond to an email right away and we get checked up on every 5 minutes to make sure all emails are responded to in a timely manner.

All ads have to be handed in by Tuesday at 12pm. D* has been known to go out on Tuesday mornings to a) get her hair done, b) get her car in the shop, c) shopping, or d) pick up an ad she should've picked up on Monday. Her ads get handed in by 1:30 pm if we're lucky.

I feel bad for the other sales rep, M*. The way their commission works is they have to bring in a total of let's say 5000 inches per issue. So M* and D* have to work together to keep those inches that minimum amount. If not they receive their basic salary pay. M* usually brings in over 3500 inches. D* can barely fill the gap. But when it does happen it's usually because M* so, either way D* gets paid the same as M* by doing less than half the work.

The entire company system was built to fail for everyone else... but her.

She's gotta be doing the boss.

XP