Further Adventures in Minion-sitting

I've talked about my minion in this space before, the wonderful lady who took over some of my job responsibilities and has been carrying them out with great zeal and an even greater lack of quality control. She has recently been asked to redesign our group's newsletter, and has attacked that project with her usual mix of eagerness, good humor, and failure.

I'm not holding myself up as a paragon of design; if I have a style, it's quick-and-dirty functionalism without bells, whistles or flourishes (see: this blog page). I've had no formal or informal training beyond an old manager who would occasional look at something I came up with, shake his head, and say, "Christ, that's bad. Try again." Which is what I'm longing to tell the minion. Her redesign prominently features the colors orange, black, and navy blue. She recently discovered the gradient function, so in several instances one of these colors fades into another. All of this is ugly, but not horrifying. What's horrifying is that in half the newsletter, she used navy blue as a background color for where the text goes. For the other half, she used a dark-colored tiled graphic. Trying to read more than a paragraph of this newsletter would make my eyes explode. I've spent all morning trying to come up with a way to tell her this that won't hurt her feelings.

In other work-related frustration, my usually awesome boss has been holding up another project by asking thoroughly useless questions. She'd understand the concepts if she'd read my responses, but she doesn't have time to do that because her daughter was cut from her top two choices during sorority rush, and needs to be talked off whatever ledge she's sitting on. I don't have much else to add here except to say that when I have kids, I pray to god they're boys.