a class is being offered, here at work, on commercial printing. the tools, the workflow, the types of printing, stuff like that. a co-worker mentioned he might take it, so i offered to explain the commercial printing workflow to him myself. and this is what i wrote. lonnie can verify this is all true.
1. the job comes in via sales. On the sales team there is going to be at least one sales person who has slept his or her way to the “top” [which means, the big money accounts are assigned to them.], one addicted to coke, and one who spends his or her entire day as far away from the office as possible….the “mystery sales rep.” ….no one is even sure what they look like. Or, all of these traits can be combined into one ubersales person.
2. The job goes through customer service/estimation or whatever they call it. The csr’s are treated like crap and paid less, but at least one of them thinks they are better than the rest, and feels that he or she spends enough energy being nice to customers, so they don’t have to be nice to co-workers. One of them is probably sleeping with one of the sales people. Probably the one addicted to coke. If not, he or she is sleeping with a multitude of people in the shop. And one of them does the majority of the work.
3. digital pre-press is full of skater punks and goths who know nothing of traditional pre-press, unless they earned some kind of AA in Commercial Printing. [which means they are never leaving the world of printing and probably smoke a lot of pot.] everyone in this department likes the fact that what they do scares the more mature employees [aka: dinosaurs] who are used to “old ways.” and take great delight in tossing around terms like PostScript, font substitution, bitmap, screen preview, PDF, EPS, simply to watch the dinosaurs tremble. They are full of themselves, and you should stay on their good side at all times, unless you know how to do their job. Don’t talk to them in the morning because they are probably hung over. Half of them are in a band.
4. traditional pre-press. These people come in at 5:30 in the morning. They still wear the press shirts that display the name of the shop before it was bought and sold to the last three corporations that tried to make it a profitable business. Those were the “good old days.” They are union employees, who’s profession is dying out. Most of them are bitter about this, and walk around mumbling under their breaths. They hate the digital pre press dept, and spend a lot of time complaining about their music. Leave them alone and let them do their job…and don’t feed them, they bite.
5. press-men. These guys listen to talk radio all day long. They like tom likus and rush limbaugh, and they openly lust after the slutty csr with two failed marriages and bleach blond hair. They SECRETLY lust after the dark little goth girl who works in digital. They all chain smoke. And bathe infrequently.
6. bindery and finishing. This department is full of contract employees from temp agencies who do not speak English. They spend their days collating or binding or replacing pages with other pages or other really boring things. They all gather together in the lunch room and speak about you in a different language. They think you are spoiled. But they work harder than anyone else in the shop, so just be nice to them. The entire dept. is ruled over by a manager with a mood disorder. He plays softball like it’s a religion. His face gets really red when he’s angry and twice a day he blows his top and the entire shop can hear him yell. Nobody pays attention to him.
7. shipping and fulfillment. This is where you go to get drugs. They run their own little “shipping and fulfillment” business on the side. They keep porn in the warehouse bathroom and are never without visine in their pockets. They come back from lunch stoned, well, more stoned then they are the rest of the day. Unless they drive a delivery truck, then they come back from lunch drunk.
And that is a commercial print shop, your little print job can get screwed up at any one of these stops in the workflow. Badly. And they will never even notice. It’s AWESOME. Why did I ever leave?