Bad Business

Your Sis made a brochure for the new school year and handed it over to a local printer, adopted a haughty demeanor, pointed with steely glare, and yelled "make it so, cur!" It works much better on retail clerks than me; it takes more than that to get me to do the dishes.

It was a straight-forward print job. A tri-fold, double-sided, letter-sized brochure. It has some spot color. She turned it in before we left for Washington. She received a call yesterday (Wednesday) saying there was a problem with the job. The local printer sent it to another shop (they apparently can't handle color locally), and the other site couldn't read her file's fonts. I saw the file as she designed it. She's not using archaic typefaces. Any print shop with automatic Microsoft Office updates would get them; even her hamster-powered laptop got the updates. She decided to run the brochure in b/w so the local printer could handle the job, and they offered to meet her today before they officially opened to get the job done before school starts Monday.

You Sis says she would have had no idea how to handle this if I hadn't spoken of my own print jobs. And the print shop did two things very bad things:

1) They didn't tell her that the job would be sent to another facility with potential difficulties in fie handling.

2) They waited ten days to tell her they had a problem. Granted, they knew she was out of town last week. Let's set aside the possibility of calling her cell phone to inform her of this. They knew she returned Saturday and waited additional four days to inform her of the problem.

She won't use them again even if they handle the b/w print just fine. By the way, she went to this shop because I discouraged her from going to the other local shop, as they royally screwed up my magnet order back in January.

We talked volleyball last night. The school hired a team of spouses to handle both teams. I know the husband coaches local volleyball in the offseason, and I think she may as well. To the relief of many parents, the varsity team now has a male coach, a development thought to magically make them better in the toughest conference in the state. I assume he can use a shorthand developed in previous years, and that may help, but if this team doesn't win their division or the playoffs, this season will be seen as a failure. For the vocal parents to be satisfied, these coaches have to surpass what Your Sis and the other coach provided. And keep in mind, Your Sis ended her final season with a 4-1 winning ratio.

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