Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Late-Night Printing

You know how some clients just sit and wait for oppor­tu­ni­ties to really make life dif­fi­cult for you? One of my cur­rent clients decided yes­ter­day at 5pm that he really needed 40 color laser demo copies of a brochure we’re design­ing to com­pli­ment the web site por­tion of the project. Oh, and he needed them later in the evening, or by 8am the fol­low­ing (this) morn­ing. By the way, did I men­tion that the pho­tog­ra­phy for the project had not been totally sub­mit­ted? Or that the body copy hadn’t been writ­ten for half the brochure?

Of course, he wouldn’t have time to get these items to me before he needed the 40 copies. So, from around 6pm last night, straight through until I dropped the copies off at the hotel this morn­ing at 9:30am, I worked my ass off to please my client. I’m an idiot.

Now, you must under­stand that I believe in mak­ing clients happy, but some­times I just go to stu­pid lengths to do so. This was one of those times.

Through var­i­ous file-format and printer mishaps (I used Kinko’s for their top-of-the-line Tec­tronix, although it made my life hell for about 3 hours last night), I blew an entire 15-hour period on what ended up being (get this) 15 copies of the brochure! Paper jams and mis-prints con­tributed to the extreme reduc­tion of the total num­ber of deliv­er­ables, at least that’s what I think was the cause: it could eas­ily have been the evil spir­its that the old guy next to me was mum­bling about the entire night. That was a thrill in itself, believe me.

So, as if all that effort was not enough, an hour after I drop them off he actu­ally picks them up, and calls all upset because some of the copy is wrong (!), and because the pho­tos I used for one sec­tion were not the ones he had in mind (which we have not yet received from him, BTW), and he thought we were send­ing it off to the print shop for some rea­son (it isn’t even close to the sched­uled deliv­ery date, and the project design has yet to be com­pletely approved, so I don’t know where he got that idea), and wanted to make sure that under no cir­cum­stance could it be printed before the changes/corrections he wanted were made.

I haven’t slept in 2 days. This is the sec­ond time this week that I have done this.

First time: Sunday/Monday. Client: The Same.

I’m an idiot.

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Thursday, January 23rd, 2003.

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• Design

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