Tenterhooks

Argh. I’m waiting for news from the university, to see if they’ve given me the Masters place. All plans have been postponed for months, because this is my number one priority. Everything depends on this.
If I get a place, I need to make arrangements pronto. Find a place to stay. Get the fees paid. Book my flight tickets, call my relatives in California. See if they want me to go for a SARS checkup, heh. Quit my job.
If I don’t get a place, I’ll continue doing what I’m doing now, until it kills me. Sometimes I wonder why people hire designers when they still want to control the design. I’m more like an executor. ‘Make it better’, I’ve been told. How? They don’t know. Or, make the colour brighter.
Nobody knows how (ahem) carefully I code my pages for my clients, so that everything’s clean, easy to update and program, and the file size is smaller.
Nobody cares that I label all my images with ALT text, let along the occasional longdecriptions. Maybe a few blind people out there have noticed. Everyone else, after all, is able to see, so they don’t need to know that I use header tags.
Nobody knows how often I curse under my breath (today was a fine example) when hideous font tags are added to my code. Or how often I sneak back in to a folder and abolish all of them … how dare they overrun my preciousss stylesheet.
Tomorrow the same will happen to me. And thus my life drones on, day after day, not being taught anything new; earning less than when I first started working, and not likely to earn any more. Blah blah blah…
I’m teaching myself XML, I’m trying my darndest to master the slippery Actionscript, and I think I’m due for a time out so I can go wallow in self-pity some more >:-P
Then again I’m lucky I still have a job and a roof above my head. And I’m still alive. No fever, last I checked.
I guess I should be thankful.
And now, maybe I should give USC a call. Pray for me.
[ Update: No news yet! I ended up speaking to the answering machine. Sob. Why can’t I have a future?? ]