Anamorphic Widescreen Aspect Ratios Can Suck My Ass

Everyday, I am confronted with stupidity in the workplace. Most of the time, it's my coworkers who provide the entertainment, but about once a week, it's a client. They're usually more fun.

There are many flavors of stupidity witnessed in my industry. In case you didn't know, my industry is broadcast duplication/distribution. This means that we take purchase orders from advertising agencies to send commercials to TV and radio, and some other outlets like cable networks. Occasionally, we have to send things out for internal meetings (which is what I mostly handle), and sometimes we have to send things to unusual recipients, like a baseball park or ski resort hotels in remote parts of the Northwest Territory because some executive can't wait until he gets home to watch the newest commercial.

One of my favorite flavors of stupidity is ignorance of technology. This is undoubtedly a technology-based business. You can't get around it. Unfortunately, there are many people who went to school for business or English or marketing who are in a position where they should know a little bit about new technology. I stress that word 'should'. These people make me wonder why I can't get a job doing what they do when I know what's what, and they don't know which way is up.

Typically, the ignorance of technology is rooted in FTP transfers or codec confusion. An FTP transfer is when you use a telnet connection to transfer bulk data files between two internet sites. This means that if you want me to send a VHS tape with one commercial on it to a remote hotel on one of the smaller Hawaiian islands, and you want it there in less than twelve hours, you're probably unaware that you could send it yourself using your company's FTP site. A client actually asked me to do that one time. Just for shits and giggles, I looked into all the costs, which include three satellite uplinks, a post-production facility in Honolulu, a car courier, and a helicopter courier. Cost: $3000. Then I said, "does the recipient have their notebook with them, and does it have an FTP access application on it? Are they going to be in a meeting in a conference hall that has a digital projector? You do know that you could just post the spot to your FTP, send the recipient the link, then he could run a line out of his notebook to the projector, and it would cost you nothing, right?" I only asked because I know that all of these executives have company notebooks, and I know that they all have access to an FTP site via their notebooks. I saved the client $3000 and made myself look like one intelligent son of a bitch. It doesn't take much to do that when dealing with people in this industry.

Obviously, this isn't all common knowledge, I know it from working with it, but it's also because I PAY ATTENTION! I have dealt with people at the ad agencies who were probably blowing the HR director to get their jobs, because there's no way they could've passed any kind of test or exam in college, let alone graduate. And then they somehow manage to keep their jobs for as long as a year while being blissfully unaware of how to do anything right. After about a year, they get promoted because no one in their department can stand to deal with them anymore, but they won't fire them. Makes absolutely no sense.

Today's fun instance of ignorance comes courtesy of an idiot in Rochester, NY. He wanted us to send him a Chevrolet spot on a DVD in "widescreen 16.9 radio," which makes absolutely no sense. First, I had to assume that 'radio' was actually meant to be 'ratio'. Then, I had to assume that he's an idiot. Then, I had to email back and tell him that the only way he was getting his 16.9 ratio was if we encoded the spot to high-definition, which is what a 16.9 widescreen ratio is in the first place, it would cost him about a $1000. Normally, for a DVD with one spot, plus shipping, he would be paying about $40. Then, this is even better, I responded and noted the costs of encoding and that if we sent it in 4:3 aspect ratio (which is normal for TV), it would only cost him about $40 total. His response? "Just make it regular." At this point I knew that I was dealing with a special idiot because he probably heard somewhere about widescreen 16.9 being the best resolution or something and wanted it that way because he wanted it to look really good so that he would look really good. This means he probably also had no idea what I was talking about when I referred to 4:3. I know, this isn't common knowledge, and I admit that when I was confronted with the question, I had to get my memory refreshed, but this guy really seemed to have no idea.

I think its the technologically ignorant people working in technology-reliant fields who bother me the most when it comes to the myriad flavors of stupidity I have to endure every day in this grey cube-farm.