Funny story. One of my colleagues is on a long vacation, leaving my team of slaves short one. Naturally, when a team’s ranks are reduced, it’s to be expected that the remaining members pick up the slack to some capacity, which is fine and all, since that’s how a team operates. Needless to say, my workload has grown a little bit on my co-worker’s absence, but I’m alright with that, because the same can be said about the other members of my team.
However, it’s the circumstances in which my workload’s increase has come about that has me a little perplexed, which is a nicely-worded way of saying “I do not agree with the way things are, and I shake my head when I think about it.”
Basically, a number of people I work with have been tasked with removing time stamps from well over 800 JPEGs. Be it through using the clone stamp, healing brush, liquefy tool; whatever it takes to make sure that these images no longer have time stamps on them. Subsequently, while they are off in Photoshop lala-land, I am the one who is getting the brunt of the actual, meaningful work overflow. I’m confident enough to say that I’m probably the most qualified to be doing the work that matters, but my current workload is looking pretty gargantuan at the moment, which doesn’t exactly make me feel peace of mind.
Mind you, time stamps on photographs are not a default setting on most digital cameras, so long story short is that some noob, and I use that term because only a noob would really be so micromanaging to want to have time stamps on the pictures they take, would turn on this useless feature in the first place. Conversely, it is very safe to say that had this noob not turned on time stamps in the first place, a massive, massive number of work hours would be freed up from my colleagues, to where they too could get their hands on some work that actually matters in the grand spectrum of my workplace’s objectives.
However, this isn’t a gripe towards my colleagues by any stretch of the imagination, they’re about as perplexed as I am at the inane nature of the work they’re doing. Ultimately, it led to a discussion about cost vs. labor, and the backward nature of what they’re doing now, as opposed to what could have been done alternatively.
Basically, they’ve been working on these images for like two weeks now. If you assume somewhere around 120 hours of work put into tediously touching up images to remove time stamps, you’re looking at a substantial amount of money.
Very, very likely to be way more money than it would have cost to have had the noob go back out to this site, and literally retake every single picture they took the first time around, but with the time stamp feature disabled on their camera. Bam, 800+ JPEGs with no stamp on it, completed in a single afternoon.
It was brought up that the site was pretty far outside of the State of Georgia, but the point remains, with over 120 hours blown on touchups to almost a thousand images in which only a fraction will actually get used, I’m still fairly certain that the cost of flying noob out to the site to retake every image would still be cheaper.
That would make too much sense though.
Whatever though, when the day is over, pointless work as it may be, it’s justifying the existence to my colleagues, and I’d rather them have jobs than be more statistics of unemployed America.
