ONE SELF PORTRAIT EVERY DAY in 2020 : 275 

I bought this Macintosh Classic when I came to London in 1998, it was already old by then but I liked the way it looked and I thought that early computers might become collectibles. 

I remember it was around 1993 when I first heard of design software. I was working as a waiter in Montecatini and looking for work. There was an ad for a graphic designer and when I phoned I was asked if I knew Quark and Photoshop but I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Then a year later I was working as a painter and decorator in France and the guy working with me was a graphic design student and he told me all about Mac and design software. With the money I earned I went to an Apple Mac shop and bought a Macintosh Performa 5200 (which was an all-in-one computer and monitor, I kind of ugly beige version of what would become the early iMacs). 

I remember while I was buying it I asked the vendor if he could install Quark, Photoshop, Freehand and Illustrator on it. He pointed out that software wasn’t free (I didn’t know that) and all that software would cost more than the computer itself. He told me that he would install demo versions of the software so that I could start learning how to use them before I earned enough money to buy them. 

I bought myself huge teach yourself books (one for the mac and one for each of the softwares) and started learning each software methodically from page one to page seven hundred and something. I became a bit of an expert in each of the programmes and it turned out that the vendor had taken pity on me and had installed (illegally) the full working versions of the software.

I also became an expert on Mac mainly because the mac I bought was faulty and Apple had recalled them to be replaced. I didn’t know that (there was no internet at the time) so I while trying to work out what could be going wrong I learnt everything about how a mac works. I eventually took it back to the shop, they checked the serial number and told me about the fault and replaced it.

I was working as a barman in a pizzeria / night club in Lugo when I replied to an ad by Politec SLR near Macerata for a graphic designer. I got the job, during the interview / test. I showed my skills in photoshop and Quark and I lied about my work experience (it was before internet so things were difficult to verify) saying that I had worked for several invented small companies in the UK. The fact that I could speak English was also a bonus.

I see that Politec still exists and is now called Biemmegraf:

https://www.biemmegraf.it/

The job was badly paid and I was told during the interview that I would have to work extra hours in the evenings and on Saturdays without being paid for overtime, I accepted as I was so happy to have that kind of job.

The job was grim, there was the boss, six workers (including me) and a receptionist. Nobody talked to each other and everybody went home for lunch as they lived close by.

One day, I saw one of the nicer guys (he would say good morning to me sometimes),

struggling with a backlog of work and I was doing alright so I offered to help him. He was really surprised but also very grateful and I helped him finish the job on time.

It was lucky that I introduced the idea of co-operation and helping out at least to one person because a couple of weeks later I made the biggest cock-up I had done so far. I had just finished preparing film for a huge sofa and armchair catalogue (I can’t remember the name but it was a well known brand of luxury furniture, hopefully I’ll remember before the end of this text) and my friend (the only friend I had there, the guy I had previously helped) notices that I had the emulsion on the wrong side. I was in deep shit as I would have to redo all the film with the emulsion on the correct side and it was a waste of a lot of money. He told me to pretend that everything was OK and during lunch he stayed with me and while I was making the new film he disposed of my mistake into bin liners he took down to the rubbish area.

The boss there was a nasty guy, he kept on telling you to finish things quickly but then tell you off for rushing.The only way that you could keep up with his demands was to work late (for free of course). I politely took it in for months, I would be angry but I wouldn’t say anything, then one day I exploded.

It was during a meeting with a client and the client complained that something was done in a certain way (I really can’t remember the details) and he wanted it done in a different way and the boss said that he agreed and that I had got it wrong. I got so angry inside because I had previously done it the way the client wanted it and he had made me work even later than usual to change it. I exploded in Italian but the gist was “For Feck sake, I can’t believe you’re blaming me for your cock-up. You’re just a fecking, incompetent joke” Everybody else was silent, my co-workers were shocked that anybody had the guts to go against the boss and in that way, I then proceeded to list all the injustices he had done to me and the others during the past nine month and using a swear word every other word. When I finished I could see my boss frozen with anger and embarrassment with a tear in his eyes and he said “You shouldn’t have said those things” and I answered that I shouldn’t have used those words but these things needed to be said.

I didn’t get the sack and the reason was that there was a new machine that they got a month earlier which would print film and do the impagination automatically and at the time I was the only one who could work it as the instructions were in English and I was the only one who could understand it (I also was the one who had to phone the company in England when things were not working).

I did leave a few months later to join a design company in Macerata called Ephemeria. I also learnt to let steam out earlier instead of keeping things in until I can take no more.

Most of the work I did was using QuarkXpress for layouts, Freehand for vector drawings and i started with Photoshop 2 (during that time Photoshop 3 came out and it was a really big thing because it introduced layers). The macs were much more unstable than now and they crashed all the time so we had to save our files very often and when working on what at the time were big files, saving could take several minutes each time and it made us smoke a lot. I remember I used to press apple-S (now cmd-S) with my left hand while taking a cigarette out of the packet with my right hand.

I AM STILL ALIVE

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