When the Customer Really Isn't Right

According to the file name, the brochure art that was forwarded to me was on its seventeenth revision. The client had either fired the designer or the designer had quit, I couldn't tell, but he was hoping I could make 'a few quick edits' to his website.

The designer in question, forwarded the WordPress login info with a note saying she was more than happy to let someone take over the edits, and warning that they were not easy edits to make.

Apparently, once he was more or less happy with the brochure, he then decided to have her do a website, but he didn't understand why the website couldn't be 'exactly' like the brochure. Looking through the pages of the brochure, I could well imagine the difficulty of coding stylesheets that would deliver the mix of fonts, sizes, alignments, etc., on the pages of the brochure.

For one thing, you don't really get to pick exact fonts with HTML/CSS code, you designate a neighborhood of fonts an let the browser render in whatever it thinks is the closest available font. If you've picked an exotic font that most people aren't going to have on their computers, you're not going to get 'exactly' the same result. Getting the complicated nesting of elements in the brochure, too, while I'm sure it could technically be accomplished by a stylesheet virtuoso, but it would be an epic effort.

I won't claim to be an expert on web design, my wheelhouse has always been print, but if he'd started building the website with me I would have told him to forget about matching the brochure exactly. Ink on paper doesn't look the same as a screen shining light directly in your eyes anyway. No the green won't be quite the same, no the fonts might not all match your brochure (depending on whose browser is rendering it). Get over it. Nobody is going to take your brochure and hold it up to your website and compare that shit, only you are doing that.

I'm pretty sure the fired/quit designer told him the same thing but this is not a person who listens to such things. So I gather the designer did the only logical fix: she made PNG images out of the brochure's elements and place those images in the WordPress template. Which is fine, except it isn't.

First of all, in terms of search engine optimization, if your text is rasterized in PNG files, you're invisible to Google. If nobody comes to your site because Google's crawlers can't figure out what the hell you're going on about, it doesn't much matter what your site looks like.

Another reason it's not okay is when you want to just 'quickly fix a few typos,' you're going back to the brochure, making the edits, then trying to figure out the dimensions those PNGs were exported out at so you can replace them. I was facing four pages of handwritten notes about things the client wanted tweaked or fixed and each line he'd written was a time consuming mess.

I was tempted to take the client's money. If the site had been coded in WordPress to begin with in a sensible way, it was maybe a half hour to an hour of work. As it is, it would probably have taken me six to eight hours and there were a couple of things on his wish list that I probably couldn't have managed (I won't say they're impossible, but they might be impossible with my skill set). If he's willing to pay upwards of $600 in shop labor because he didn't listen to sensible advice from the last designer, I'll play.

But my employer decided this was a bridge too far, and that was probably the most ethical decision. Like I say, you might as well leave the mistakes in the site since nobody is going to find it anyway. I always cringe when I see someone still designing websites using tables like it was 1996 or something, but this was by every measure even worse. Plus, having dealt with this client before, let's just say I've already experienced him asking me to do something that's not actually possible, and having him decide it meant I don't know what I'm doing.

And as frustrating as he is to work for, lest you think I'm just trashing my client, I think he's a decent guy. And I think the business he's trying to start sounds like a great thing if he can get it off the ground. Hopefully he'll grow ears at some point.

I Can See My House from Here

Google Earth can be interesting. The streetview for my house still shows my wife's former roommate's car in the driveway, so it's at least five years since the Google bug with the camera on top drove by. But the satellite has been by since October, when I polka-dotted my car. Judging from the garden beds, I'd say it was after the beginning of March, when Corinna planted a bunch of stuff under row cover.

I think the Google satellite shot even shows how the dots have faded. I made a mistake ordering from Discount Labels. They're cheaper than Gill Studios, the other option, but you get what you pay for. When they faded so fast, I called to complain and was told pinks and reds fade fast. I'm like, bullshit, I see Clinton/Gore stickers on cars that are still red and blue, I just put the dots on in October and they're already almost white. I paid extra for a Pantone match to get PMS215 and it's gone.

I was like, these are 5" diameter bumper stickers, why would you not use UV inks? That would be a custom order, I was told, more expensive and so on. I bet Gill's higher price reflects that they'd use UV inks by default on anything called a bumper sticker (as they should). The best I could get out of Discount was a box of 250 red 5" labels printed with shitty ink that will fade to pink before eventually being white like my pink dots now are.

So Discount Labels did their best to make it right, but sometimes your best just isn't good enough, I'll never buy from them again.

Biz Card

Also while sorting out stuff that needed to go, I found my first business card. Well, not quite, I had one and press credentials at Nadler Publishing back in my first job, but when Nadler folded and I tried to make a living as a freelance graphic designer, I had cards made. Sprung for two colors of thermography even.

A lot of things I designed circa 1996 are pretty painful for me to look at. This card isn't the next Coca Cola logo but it's not terrible IMHO.

I like it better than the logo I did for a hamburger joint that's still flying a version of my design 18 years later. I probably don't need to tell you that all the contact info is invalid these days—as if anyone has a fax or a pager in 2014. Okay, I do know some people who still use a fax machine. They're the people who call asking about the file for a job, and when I say I emailed it to them, they say, "I don't check my email every day."

Dropping Forty T

"I knew these people a long time ago, in another life, and I never thought they'd reach out to me like this..."

The man who said this line didn't seem to be aware that he sounded like the voiceover for the opening of a bad TV show, one that might star Chuck Norris. This line would have made me cringe if it came from a television, but it came from a customer in the print shop where I work.

Most of the time I don't deal with walk-in traffic. But when the primary person who does is on the phone, and all three owners are out of the office, there's not much I can do but try. So how could I help?

"You could print out a document if I brought it to you on disc or emailed it to you, right?" Yes, yes I can do that. What will it cost? Black and white copies are twelve cents per, there'll be a $20 output fee (this usually gets the vague 'can you print this out for me' character to leave). It's a legit fee, and we do charge it. There's usually some time involved figuring out how to get the file from them, how to extract it from the amateur office software they've cobbled it together in, and so on. Even charging the fee, it's our least profitable sort of transaction, but it's easier to do it for a price than to turn people away flat out. The most common follow up question is 'can I get on your computer and print it out myself,' which we actually draw the line. No, you may not touch my computer with your kiddie-porn searching, malware downloading, sticky from junk food fingers. Not for twenty bucks, not for two hundred.

But this guy, he didn't go there. He got weirder. Which, to my way of looking at it, is more entertaining.

"Do you stock A4 paper?" he asked. I'll save you googling that one, it's the European standard letter size, what we use 8-1/2 x 11 inch paper for, the metric-speaking world uses 210 x 297 millimeter, it's a sheet about a quarter inch skinnier and three eighths inch longer than what we're used to.

We don't stock anything that size, I explained, but we get parent sheets of lots of paper we could cut down to A4 if that's what you need. Then he tells me that he has some A4 stock at home he can provide. Great. Provide it, we'll print your documents out. A4 is one of the paper sizes Xerox offers default buttons for, and in seven years this would be my first time ever selecting it. Not super interesting, but it's a first, right?

"After I get them back from my lawyer," he explained, then going into lengthy detail about his diabetes, arthritis, terrible eyesight and how hard it is for him to get these documents straight. He was getting less weird and more boring and I tried my best to give him zero conversational handles to extend this visit.

We'll be here whenever you're ready, I said. I just could not shake this character.

"You can delete the files after you're done, right? From your server and the print spooler and everything?"

Huh?

Sure, whatever, yes we can do that. It's unusual, we keep stuff on file normally so people can reorder things, but if you want us to nuke it we'll nuke it.

"Because there was this whole hostage situation here the other day," he said.

It's true, there was a police standoff that blocked off the streets for a few hours when the cops came to serve an arrest warrant and the subject of the warrant decided to make it interesting. But I didn't get what that could have to do with me deleting this clown's important, lawyer-vetted documents after I printed them.

"Well," he said. "The people I'm doing this for, if there were someone more important than the President, these people would be it if you know what I mean." I had no clue what he meant, but I could tell my ignorance wouldn't last. He had to enlighten me.

Then he got into the NSA and how they harvest so much data it's nearly unmanageable, but when there are certain red flags or connections, they can focus in on something. Uh, yeah, I suppose that's true. Then he dropped the bomb.

"I'm facilitating the transfer of funds from the Saudi royal family to the Rothchilds," he said. "And you don't want the government getting wind of it when someone is willing to invest $40 Trillion dollars in something like this, especially when that government could only come up with $800 Billion for the same thing."

Apparently Uncle Sam would be embarrassed to find out that the Saudis and Rothchilds were funding some sort of infrastructure project (I'm unclear what infrastructure this is supposed to be but he said it was kind of like the Works Progress Administration from the Depression) to the tune of fifty times as much money. I checked the guy's math out, and he's right, $40 Trillion is fifty times $800 Billion. It's also, as far as I can tell from a quick wiki search, about four times as much money as there is if you are looking at the United States dollar (in circulation and in the theoretical realms of reserve banking). Or to put it another way it's almost half the Gross World Product, the collective GDPs of everywhere.

But apparently, not only are the Saudi royals so solvent they can throw this kind of cash around, but in order to do so they need the assistance of a talkative, indiscreet, diabetic, arthritic guy who hasn't been able to get his home printer to work ever since his girlfriend used it.

It was hard to keep a straight face, but you know, I wouldn't want to offend a person who has friends who can, as he put it, 'Drop forty T.'

Lorde and Ruler

I've had an earworm lately, this Lorde song, Royals. Maybe you've heard it, unless you're living in Ted Kaczynski's old digs. I don't really get the song. Does she mean we'll never play on a substandard Major League Baseball team? That we'll never be related to some obnoxious British twits born into wealth and celebrity? Are these things one would aspire to?

She's plenty cute of course, and I guess if you have looks and a good hook, there's not really a requirement that you make sense, you can be a pop star. I heard an interview with her on Q with Jian Ghomeshi, and she seemed quite charming and very mature for her age, so maybe there's an angle to that lyric that I'm just not hip to, maybe she's brilliant.

But while I don't know what she means, necessarily by 'royals,' and I guess I don't much care, I decided I know exactly what she means by 'let me be your ruler.' That, and making a ruler of her was easier, graphically speaking, than making her a queen bee.

Duly Posted

A House Divided

I made a t-shirt and sweatshirt for a customer who was more than willing to pay a setup charge for a below-minimum order.

It seems he has two kids at college, but they aren't at the same one. Their two schools were, however, about to butt heads in a football match.

T-Shirts

Guess who's making t-shirts.





Go on, guess. I don't generally blog about my work. It seems to many people there is a boundary between personal and professional life and all sorts of room for people to take things wrong or for a vent about some high maintenance client to get back to the boss or whatever.



But we've added a new product line at Almar, t-shirts. Well, and bags and whatnot, pretty much anything you can inkjet a 12-1/2 x 16 image onto. As long as it's 100% cotton anyway, I guess synthetics don't do as well with this process.



Anyway, we're still developing the web site and, for that matter, some of the details as far as specific types of things we can do with this equipment. So far, though, we've already gotten a warm response from clients who were already doing offset printing with us. And I've gotten to play a bit.



I'm not a big t-shirt wearer. My work shirts tend to be button-down, not my first choice but that's what happens when there's a retail angle.



My first choice is pretty much Hawaiian shirts with a bias towards Aloha's from Hawaii and a secondary bias toward natural fibers: silk, then cotton, and if neither is available, that rayon better have a kick-ass pattern.



But the ability to create my own designs, maybe that will win me over to the T's.

Bespoke

My newest spoke card (a business card I designed for a new boutique).

Trade Joke

Steve Martin did a bit that was supposedly just for the plumbers he heard were having a convention, with the punch line, 'It says sprocket not socket!' — beat — 'Were these plumbers supposed to be here this show?'



I guess this little piece of bicycle decor is from the same bin. I almost went with 'Verlag is the new Gill Sans' instead.

Flag

I designed this feather flag for the Jazz Ambassadors.

Lost in Translation Much?

It's that time of year, when the Agfa Acento greets me in the morning with a gripe that it took a chill in the night.

It doesn't seem to affect the performance of the machine, but besides the message telling me nothing because it uses the Metric System (that idiotic Esperanto of weights and measures, foist upon the world to deprive life of any flavor left in it after the nanny state and multinational corporations are done with it), the message was obviously written by someone who's English was as fluent as my Japanese. No doubt they fed a perfectly sensible warning into one of those free online translation sites.

Reminds me of When You Are Engulfed in Flames.

Original Pizza

The past couple days I've been effectively on a paid vacation, getting paid to learn stuff I've been meaning to learn for a few years, namely Dreamweaver in general and cascading style sheets in particular.

By the end of the day, my brain is jelly, but it's a change of pace and, as I say, it's something I've tried to learn on my own in a very half-assed after the kids are in bed way for a few years now. There's a big difference between tying in at 9:00 at night when you've spent two hours in the car commuting, eight or more hours working, done a load of laundry, fixed dinner for your kids, and so on, and sitting down at 9:00 in the morning, a full hour after you're normally supposed to be at work and at a place that's half as far from your house.

And with a very competent guide, someone who will let you run of a cliff but also show you how to back up and try that over the right way, Coyote.

Anyway, the class is in Corporate Woods, which I love. Not just because it's only half as far from home as my job is, but because Corporate Woods has to be one of the most beautiful office parks in the world. Most office parks are, from the time they break ground until they are someday leveled, essentially a blight on the community they are built in. They are as ugly as they are homogeneous, the kind of thing that David Byrne described in the movie True Stories as the dream of modern architects come true except the architects don't know it because you don't need an architect to build these things.

Corporate Woods, though, has among other virtues actual woods. The buildings aren't all identical, either, and there seems to be plenty of parking without parking garages that make you think of the Soviet Union.

First time you have to find a place in there, make extra time though, because nothing is perfect. Corporate Woods' winding streets and minimalist street signs made me glad I'd left what felt like 30 minutes too early on day one, which put me in the classroom right on time.

The other thing that rocks about this situation is I've eaten lunch two days in a row at Original Pizza, which is right around the corner from Corporate Woods. If it's not the best pizza you can buy in Kansas City, it's top three.



Watching the old guy who owns the joint spin crusts is worth a visit in and of itself. I've learned, sort of, to throw a round pie. No rolling pin required or desired, just my hands. But about a third of the time I tear the dough at least once and the diameter of my pies is subject to wild fluctuations.

This guy, he's probably thrown a million crusts by now, 32 years at it. But not only does he toss a perfectly uniform circle that fits the pan it doesn't meet until after it's baked on the oven floor every time, and not only does he do this without ever, as far as I can tell, ever tearing the dough, he does it while paying much more attention to the soccer match on the big screen than to the dough in his hands.

This guy could be blinded with lye and still throw a perfect crust, even before getting treatment for the lye burns.

Normally, I brown bag my lunches, this whole training thing has made a big exception to that for me. So I'm torn between wishing Original Pizza was across the street from my work and being glad they're not since I couldn't afford to waltz over for a slice every midday.

Take Your Daughter to Work Day

I know, it's become gender neutral, but I happen to have daughters. I wasn't sure I could really manage Mo and do my job, but the question was settled when I asked her if she'd rather go to work with Daddy or go to school. She picked school.



Me and Em got almost to the office when I realized I hadn't given the girls their morning meds, so we had to turn around and take Mo her meds at school. She was in the midst of dissecting a frog when I got to her, and appeared to be having the time of her life doing it. So that was cool.



The whole class was doing it, she didn't just catch herself a frog and start cutting. Just thought I should clarify, this is the kid that once bit a possum.

Anyway, we got to the office at ten and I proceeded to train her on bits and pieces of my job.

Some of the stuff doesn't translate well, but she had her MP3 player and her cell phone (until she killed the battery texting).



She did get to make some plates. A lot of what we do goes direct to polyester plates, and I was hoping that device would run out of media or chemistry so I could walk her through loading it with plate material or even better yet the mixing of noxious chemicals. No such luck.



We also have a metal plate maker that's not as automated as the poly machine. A long run, an item that's likely to be reordered over and over without changes, something with critical registration, or anything that's going on the big press, these are the things we make metal plates for. I'm pretty sure my explanation went right out the other ear if it even got into her head, she was surprised that what I referred to as 'plates' were big rectangles instead of little circles.



I tried to get into the history of lithography a little bit but I might as well have been telling her about the last time I got stuck in the Inner Circle of Fault.

She had fun making plates, though. There's not a lot to it, and at one point she asked me dubiously if this was what I did all day. It's one of the things I do all day, my job (thankfully) has quite a bit of variety in it. I do prepress, I design, I rescue 'art' from word files, I do Photoshop surgery, etc.



But as with most jobs, it's not much to watch. I remember reading in 78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published and 14 Reasons Why It Just Might, a section about the fatal error of including way too many details of an author's day job, about Pat Walsh meeting a woman who worked for a circus. When he eagerly asked her what that's like, she answered that it was a lot of paperwork.

So Em made a lot of paper cranes. We had our brown bag lunches, we met the other kids who were on hand, etc. It surprised me she didn't want to work the bindery with the two other teenage girls, but the two of them were already friends, and I think Em felt the outsider when introduced.

Then my boss' kid entered the mix. (Well, one of my bosses, describing what to expect at work I had to admit I had more than one boss. Two, in some ways three or four of them, kinda like Office Space except it's such a tiny company it kind of beggars the meaning of hierarchy. If I'd thought of it, my answer would have been really that there is only one boss, the customer. Whatever I do, if anyone from the owners on down question it, as long as the honest answer is 'Because that's what the customer wanted or needed,' it's all good.)

My boss' daughter is less than half Em's age, which means she was instantly drawn to her. My kid says she wants a career on Broadway, and I know she loves the stage and musicals, but even money she ends up in Elementary Ed and happy as a clam.

She taught the little one to make paper cranes, they played hide and seek, they hid each others shoes, they played cards, they ate Dum Dums, etc.

It was super-enjoyable. I know my last employer, when asked about 'take your daughter to work' scoffed at it. Yes, it's a formal way for my kid to play hooky for a day, no it's not a big deal. But it's not devoid of value, and you have to be dead inside to not see the fun of it. I learned when part of 'management' at that former employer that you could screw around and pretend it was legitimate as 'team building' or a 'morale booster.'

Much more than the things that flew under radar in that environment, I think a bunch of us bringing our honyocks to the shop was legitimate team building and a real morale booster.

For true, our kids are why we do what we do. It's not like any shop went out of business because it shut those kids out for the sake of a 5% productivity drop for one day of the year.

Buddy is Worldwide

I listened this morning from 6:00, when my alarm went off, until 8:20 or so when I got to work, and no mention of my email or Buddy Lush in general. I was pretty sure my instinct that, no matter how fun the show is, Johnny isn't allowed to plug anything for free (or for a box of business cards) was right on.

See, when I refer to Johnny as the greatest shill in Kansas City, I don't mean it as a bad thing. Back in my Nadler Publishing days, I wrote rave 'reviews' of restaurants that were absolutely bought and paid for by the restaurant in question. I shilled for a fargon board game, for crying out loud. I jumped out of an airplane because it sold the back cover of the Singles paper to a skydiving school and then wrote up the experience (high point of that career).

My shilling skills are small beer compared to Johnny. Anyone could go on and play yes-man, suck up to every single guest or caller, pretend to be an enthusiast of everything that comes up. And anyone could just let their own personal tastes and prejudices drive what they say even if it costs them their job when they piss off a major advertiser. Knowing when you have to play it the one way no matter how distasteful, and when you can go the other way and speedbag a guest's testicles when they deserve it is a whole different deal.

Plus, being able to sell it that, no matter which way you're playing it, you're sincere.

Me, I don't have the self control to pull that off, not long term. I can barely navigate the office politics of a ten person company, let alone the minefield Johnny works in every day.

I got to work, turned off the car, and went on about my day. I don't really have a way to listen once I'm at work, I listen at home and en route and that's it. Apparently, about ten or fifteen minutes after I tuned out, Johnny granted my wish.

I can't find a podcast of the show to hear for myself, but the Xpedex driver told a coworker he'd heard that Almar Printing was the exclusive printer for Buddy Lush Worldwide. A former bandmate (miss you, be glad to take that back up) sent me a text congratulating me for being such a whore. And an old friend posted to Facebook that I was the subject of the Johnny Dare Morning Show.

I'm dying to hear what he said. It's killing me. I saw where the Buddy Lush business cards were the profile pic for a couple of the show's Facebook pages, but I can't find a podcast anywhere.

Anyway, good to know that not only is Johnny Dare the best shill in Kansas City, he's also a class act. Contrast that, with, for instance, Gene Simmons who has enough money to live a hundred shameful lifetimes and still sells his autograph.

Lush-ious

I listen to the Johnny Dare Morning Show quite a bit. My clock radio is set to 98.9, so I wake up pretty much every day to the best shill in Kansas City.

Johnny tries to come off as Mr. Blue Collar, but really, he's got to be raking it in. Just in terms of lifestyle, the travel, motorcycles, etc., nobody with a regular job could keep up. And I'm cool with that: whatever KQRC/Entercom pays him it's probably a pittance compared to what he makes for them.



Anyway, Johnny's been going to Vegas a lot lately. Twice in a month or so, where I woke up one day and thought it was a replay until I realized I hadn't heard this particular riff on Vegas.

I wouldn't be surprised if all these rants are paid for in full by the Vegas tourism people. Regardless, Buddy Lush is an image I can embrace. I don't even like gambling, can't imagine why I'd go to Vegas and listening to this rap I wanted to become part of Buddy Lush's entourage.

And Johnny mentioned that Buddy Lush would need business cards, cards that just said, 'Buddy Lush, Worldwide.'



Buddy Lush can only take off his sunglasses to shower or sleep. Can only take his suit off for sex, can only pack what will fit in his briefcase. He can only eat steak, can only have a mixed drink if it's his breakfast bloody mary. He doesn't use credit cards or ATMs. And nobody talks to Buddy Lush.



So I made the cards. And Johnny talked about them this morning, but he reduced me to 'some guy' dropping the cards off without explanation. So I sent this email to station, we'll see what happens.

Hey, I'm 'some guy.' I was listening to your riff on Buddy Lush the other day and you said Buddy Lush would need business cards that only said, 'Buddy Lush Worldwide.'

I said to myself, 'Self, you have the juice to make that happen.' And I do, so I did. I thought I knew exactly the sort of cheesy fonts to use, too (I'm a graphic designer by trade and honestly, Buddy's cards make my eyes hurt but they are totally what I pictured listening to your description of him).

Anyway, being proud of where I work, Almar Printing (working there is why I have all that juice), I enclosed my own business card in the box thinking maybe the cards would be good enough to warrant a plug. You talked about the cards but referred to me as 'some guy,' so maybe you can't say where they came from without my boss writing a check to your boss.

If you can't, I totally understand. You are the best shill in Kansas City, and if you can't tell the audience where Buddy Lush gets his business cards just for a box of cards, that's cool. On the other hand, if the next time Buddy Lush comes up in the program you can mention that Buddy Lush gets all his printing done at Almar Printing, that would make my day. My week and even month. I think it would be great if your listeners knew where real international entertainers get their raised print business cards.

Achtung!

The warning labels on things almost never seem really helpful to me. There are so many then tend to just be noise, and if you honestly don't know better than to blow dry your hair standing in a tub of water, you probably aren't going to make it far enough to need the memo about operating heavy machinery while taking prescription sedatives.

I see a lot of warning labels and say to myself, Self, coffee is hot, ice is slippery, it's nobody's fault so don't bother trying to sue.

Then there's the labels that aren't there, but maybe should be. I know a guy who once found himself wishing there's been a label on jalapeño peppers about how, after slicing them, it's a good idea to wash your hands before you go to the bathroom. I think he called 9-11, his unit was burning that badly.

My Dremel had warnings on it, all over the place. But nothing about not using it to grind down the callouses on your heel.

But my friend won't ever handle himself with capsicum coated fingers again, and I won't use my Dremel for improvised home surgery a second time either. So warning labels would be of limited value.

The ones we really need are like this. Where I work, we finally got a metal plate CTP unit (if you've ever played with nasty film chemistry, you'll appreciate how happy I am about that; and if you want a defunct Devotec 20 film processor for some bizarre reason, I know where you can get one dirt cheap). I can't remember for sure, but I don't think the Agfa was up and running before the first of the year.

It kicks ass, especially since a lot of jobs we've been using polyester plates for, but that get reordered without changes a lot of times, we can make a metal plate for just slightly more money (and I mean slightly) and use it as many times as the job gets reordered. Plus, you don't fight plate stretching and screens look tons better.



The door mechanism, however, has broken twice since we got it. The first time was right after it got there, and being a used unit, you just never know. The second time was when we had an Agfa tech out for a calibration issue. He was super apologetic (and the guys I've dealt with from Agfa are all sharp), seemed embarrassed.

He said, 'I tell people, don't lean on the hood, don't set stuff up there, and then I go and hit the open button with my tool box on there.'

The stripped gears in the release motor aren't on us this time. But I'm thinking, we got 90 days, basically, of warranty with this thing. If a guy who works on the machine and warns people about this all the time can forget and break it...

So I made a warning label. Had to speedbag the guy a bit, I guess. Fortunately he has a sense of humor.

Craptastic!

There's a woman, and I won't diagnose her exact impairment because I don't know for sure (I've suspected MR and schizophrenia, but what do I know?), who comes in my work from time to time. Most of the time, she has something she wants laminated or copied, or occasionally she wants something from the internet printed off when her home computer isn't fully functioning. No big.

Sometimes she's combative, which isn't so much fun. She also has a tendency to assume the things she's saying are perfectly clear when they are definitely not, and when she's cranky a lack of instant comprehension on the listener's part will really set her off.

Today she was in rare form. And I was intensely busy with several extra-tight deadlines. Phones were ringing, other customers were coming in, and this woman I'll call Alice wanted help writing an 'index.' This is not something we normally do in the printing business. Index whatever you want, we'll make copies, bind stuff, whatever. We'll fax stuff for you, print your index lovingly in thermography, whatever. But we're not really a copy writing service.

As near as I can figure, this 'index' was to a set of correspondence she's hoping will get her readmitted (on a second appeal) to a community college she was apparently kicked out of. Given how disruptive I've known Alice to be in my limited experience, I can't fathom what crime a teacher could commit that would warrant that teacher having to put up with Alice for a whole semester.



So here's the rub. I really wanted to tell Alice, "Look, I don't have time for your delusional bullshit, and I really don't know what you'd 'call' a letter from your grade school teacher abut what a model student you can be...' But besides being totally unprofessional, I can't allow myself to be mean to Alice. I don't know how independently Mo will ever live, her autism is pretty severe. But, say, she's living with me and her mother as an adult, or in a group home, if I find out the guy down at the print shop was an asshole to her, I'll break his legs. Alice has a different set of impairments, and not nearly as sweet a disposition, but still.

Alice was just the last thing I needed today. As I say, if it wasn't for rush jobs, I wouldn't have no jobs at all. And with the economy like it's been, I don't want anyone to think their rush job wasn't rushed. Whatever their expectations are, I want to exceed them, even if those expectations are unrealistic. That'd even be true for Alice if she wasn't one for picking a fight if you try to charge her anything for your trouble.

Don't get me wrong, Alice wasn't my big problem today. My big problem was me. Maybe rushing too fast to try and exceed those deadline expectations, or maybe I just had some flakey moments, but three times this week jobs have had to be redone because of stupid mistakes made by yours truly. What's worse, all three jobs were expensive jobs, sold by my boss. You only get paid once for a job, that's true no matter the economy, but fuck the dog on three big orders? If I was the boss, I'd say that's unacceptable, so I can't expect my boss to accept it.

And I can't entirely explain it, though the thought crossed my mind, that maybe, just maybe, if Alice wasn't in my cubicle trying to rewrite her goddamn index right now, I might not be making the next big careless error.

So the gravy on this big plate of shit? On the way home from work, I had a blowout. Gotta hit the Stuff-Mart automotive when it opens in a few hours and buy a new tire. I have big, exciting plans for tomorrow, hopefully they all work out and provide me with a delightful contrast to today...

Breaking Some Rules

Monday's slow ride was rained out, my reschedule for Tuesday was kinda bumped around by me having the girls a day early this week.




I had an absolute shit day at work. Suffice to say, if I could get to an actual responsible party at Xerox, I could have done actual violence today. The DocuColor 700 hasn't entirely lived up to its sales pitch, and in a couple of specific areas it is, if I'm to believe the analysts and techs at Xerox, designed in a way that can only be described as broken. Which doesn't reduce our customer's expectations, and it shouldn't. If it was up to me I'd have this thing back on the truck. Actually, I'd have the thing out in the parking lot and I'd be ramming it with my car.



That scene in Office Space? This copier would not get off that easily. Especially if the decision makers who obviously never worked a day in an actual production environment, could be strapped to the thing.



So what better way to construct an imaginary gulag for antagonists so remote they might was well be imaginary, even if they aren't, than a training ride?



It was startlingly therapeutic. Not so much me attacking the pedals by pretending I was stomping the shit out of some Xerox executives. Because, really, I would have pulled muscles if I could have managed that fantasy. No, really, just cranking up the hills and figuring out where the hell the trail resumed, if it did, was plenty of distraction.



I parked at the park at 87th and Lackman, and set out on a trail that seems to abruptly end. Rode the streets (which is against my personal rule: ride the trails alone, ride the streets with a group) until I spotted trail a bit further north. Then when I got to 79th, a fellow rider convinced me to try climbing 79th and riding it into Shawnee Mission Park. Which I did, and next thing you know I'm below the dam on the Mill Creek Trail, a trail I know. And I know I have some serious climbing to pay for all that downhill action in order to get back to the car.

I took the trail 3 miles to the 95th/Prairie-Something-Parkway access point. Then found myself at the foot of a hill that goes at least 3/4 miles up. Then out of trail.





I could go back downhill, which was tempting, but then I'd have to climb back out of the valley somewhere else, and I didn't want to end up in the woods in the dark again. So I crossed 435 on 95th Street and went further south on Legler, winding through office parks that are blessedly light on traffic in the evening. Remember that rule about riding streets? There was no sidewalk for a good bit of this leg. I ended up on 99th, then Santa Fe Drive, then I spotted Widmer and thought, 'Didn't I pass Widmer near my car? Wonder if it goes through.'



It doesn't. But it connects to stuff that does. Much of it, actually, downhill, ninety-something, then Mullen, Acuff, 89th Terrace, Gallery, then I'm back at my car by the skaters on the ramps.

I drove part of it to check mileage, relied on maps for the trail portions. I think it was roughly 17.5 miles in two hours. Now I gotta go to bed so I can get up and tilt at Xerox's windmills tomorrow.

Happy and Sad...

I went to boot up my Mac at work this morning and nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing, but it's acting like a hard drive failure or something along those lines. Won't boot from the CD even.

So, using the backup drive, working from an old eMac was not the funnest way to spend the day. Especially since we've suddenly gotten busy (a good thing, that).

On the up side, though, my boss had been sitting on the fence about a new machine, coming to terms with the fact that six years is old even for a powerhouse Mac tower. I understand, I do. Spend that kind of money, you feel like, 'Hope I never have to do that again!' This and the way his also-antique laptop has been running lately, it looks like I'll soon have a new Mac Pro tower on my desk. Very nicely appointed, too.

Five or six years out of a computer seemed impossible back when I was on a PC. I used to replace those every year, year and a half tops. Been over a year and a half into my iMac, though, and it's still a rock'n machine. Might seem less so compared with the new machine at work, but there's always a faster computer on another guy's desk, right?

Meanwhile, any happy dance I might do about getting a new machine is tempered by the hassle with getting the old one through the Genius Bar while hobbling through my in box with an eMac ready for the Antiques Road Show. That, and the likelihood that this next computer will still be on my desk when Em goes to College, and it won't be flamin' fast anymore by then...