Wednesday, June 18, 2008

how to make someone's hard work completely fruitless

One of my many duties at work recently included creating a cool little brochure. I spent a lot of time on it, making it from scratch and showing off my awesomeness and whatever. The whole point of the thing was for me to go down to a car show that's held every Wednesday night and talk people up and hand them pictures and thus bring in more business and myself more paychecks. Tonight being Wednesday, it was a good idea to have these brochures "printed" so I could do the above.

I / we didn't want to print them at work because not counting all the ones I test printed of all the ink and glossy paper that 100 or so full-color brochures require. So off to Kinkos. But apparently Kinkos was too expensive. So calls were made until it was decided to take our precious cargo (read: my USB key) to the UPS store. Yeah, apparently they do printing. Here's why they shouldn't.

Boss #2 came back and reported that the price was much higher than what we were quoted. Then the store called to ask what they were supposed to do. "These double-sided copies are printing out on 3 pages. Huh???" It should be noted here that I didn't use some fancy pants designing software.... I used Microsoft Word. Yeah that's right. So apparently the "insert USB key and press print" directions were too complicated. So I was on my way to the UPS store. Boss #1 decided he was going to come with, and give a nice talking-to to the guy who dared quote us one price then charge us one that was much much higher.

We get to the store and it's a different guy. I felt kinda sorry for him because Boss #1 was clearly angry. Then he handed us our "prints." It was 3 pages instead of 2. This is because someone had changed things around. The guy saw what must have been a disappointed / confused / pissed off look on my face and explained that when he came in to work, the other guy (the same guy that grossly misquoted Boss #1) was "messing" with the file. What messing with? It's a Word file! I did all the messing in the last few days! It was ready to print!

But no. The fonts were changed, which messed up the spacing. 4 out of the 10 pictures had somehow been changed to black & white. Besides defeating the purpose of a color brochure to show our business, I don't even know how he did that. Only one of the copies was double sided, but it was upside down and therefore useless. (And I know that different computers support different fonts and yadda yadda yadda, but again this was very un-fancy Word and if that had been the case then all of the fonts would have been changed since I used the same one throughout the whole brochure.)

Boss #1 got a refund, and we vowed to never use the UPS store for printing again. And that, my child, is why I'm home writing a blog and not out at a car show handing out brochures.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

FYI - Word documents do change format from computer to computer, especially if you are using a font on your computer that the other computer doens't have. Advice...ask to see a proof before the whole job is printed...or...supply the UPS Store with a pdf file and you will not have any headaches.

super des said...

I mentioned this in the post - it's not the case. I could tell because I used the same font throughout the whole document, and not all of it was changed. The guy specifically changed *certain* sections.

LittlePea said...

My uncle works for Fedex and he said this when I read him your post, "UPS. Underachieving People who Suck"

Not nice!!

Suzanne said...

Wow, that is insane. I might have killed someone.

Anonymous said...

Definitely convert anything you design to a pdf before taking it to the printer so they can't mess with it. There are free pdf conversion websites that will e-mail you your converted document if you don't have the software to do it yourself.

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