Not long ago I was exiting the freeway when I got caught up in a whirlwind of freshly printed brochures. There was a young man beside a large delivery van desperately trying to contain the mess. A skid had fallen out of the truck and paper was flying everywhere. I learned later that the printer had to pay a fine for littering, or failure to contain their load, or something. Whatever it was, it only added insult to injury.

Coming on this scene any print professional could tell you immediately what this was–it was a jinxed job.

Murphy holds its hand

Did you ever experience a situation that no matter what you did, you couldn’t make it come out right? From time-to-time printers experience the same thing and they universally call it the jinxed job. In the last post I told you that Murphy was a printer, you know, whatever can go wrong will go wrong. When a jinxed job appears Murphy walks beside it holding its hand. When it is going wrong, it is wrong every step of the way.

You start to get a sense that a jinx is coming when the bid is incorrect. Some important piece of information is missing, forgotten, or not conveyed. The customer expects the given price, but the sales rep has to eat crow, return to the customer, and beg forgiveness before giving them the new price. The most common error is paper. No, I’m not talking paper choice here, I’m saying that the estimator forgets to add in the paper. Since paper, as I’ve discussed in a previous blog, accounts for 30-60% of the job, forgetting paper could double the estimate. When that happens, the printers try to work with the customer and maybe give them the paper at cost. That should do it, right? The problem is solved so we move on. Don’t be silly it’s never that easy.

Remember this is a jinxed job and Murphy is in charge. Invariably the job gets written up wrong. The job jacket is processed normally and nobody catches the error.  Of course we don’t realize this until the job is complete and were doing a postmortem to determine what went wrong. The exercise in locating the source to avoid having the same problem  reoccur, is pointless. The blame is systemic. When Murphy is exercising full control, the mistakes happen all down the line, like Dominoes in a row.

Simple can be the worst

I recall a simple calendar we once printed for an insurance firm. The size was 18″X24″. It was a poster style rather than a multi-page calendar, so it covered the entire year. The art was simple, and the printing a breeze, since it was just one color. This job was a light walk on a summer day, a no-brainer. They had an upcoming event where they intended to distribute the posters to customers and prospective customers. No problem, the event was two weeks away. That was more than enough time to print the job. Ha! Jinxed job.

The first error belonged to the customer. There was a typo on their address. We fixed the typo and offered to reprint the job at cost, but, and this is where it really went wrong, the customer’s office was in a town some thirty-five miles away. They couldn’t make the trip to see another proof, so they told us to proceed without a proof.  We didn’t know this at the time, but Murphy was there and smiling that snide toothy grin of his. Don’t you just want to just smack him? We fixed the typo alright, but in doing so, introduced another error. The reprinted job was delivered with just two days leeway, but there was still enough time to fix our error, reprint, and make their deadline,  just barely.

This time we made sure that customer saw a proof. We were confident nothing else could go wrong. When nothing else can go wrong is when Murphy is at his best, don’t you know?  The customer came to the shop the morning of the event to pickup her job. She came in, we showed her what the printed piece looked like and we sent her happily out with a delivery person to help load it into her car. It had been raining that morning (you know where this is going, don’t you?). There were dirty puddles in the parking area. Murphy, Murphy, Murphy. Our delivery guy slipped and dropped the two carefully kraft-wrapped bundles right into the biggest puddle. We brought it back in, and tried to salvage a few “good” ones for the event, but the edges were mostly dirty. There wasn’t much to  save.

We get no respect

Finally on the 4th printing, we got it right. We missed their deadline, but we got it right. Do you think we were appreciated for all of our effort? No, we never saw that customer again. They were too nice to tell us what they really thought of us, but the message got through. They expressed loud and clear it with their feet.

The last few blogs I’ve posted have been stressing the importance giving the printer correct specifications so that your returning bids will be accurate. If you do that, and do it perfectly, will that prevent errors? No. Ask any printer you know or any that you don’t know for that matter if Murphy was a printer and you’ll hear a resounding, “Yes” or maybe an emphatic, “Hell, Yes.” For those readers who may not know Murphy’s Law, it goes like this, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” What does that mean? I’ll tell you, it means that no matter how perfectly you plan a print job, and how thoroughly you execute that plan, in the end there’s a chance that a boogie will jump out and ruin the whole darn thing.

So many steps, no wonder someone trips.

Why does Murphy pick on printers? That’s a good question that I think can be answered very simply by the complexity, and number of steps it takes to get something printed. For example I once worked on a company’s brochure. They, the company, hired a graphic designer who hired a photographer to take shots of the workplace. The pictures were professionally done, and the graphic designer did an excellent job in preparing the art. This was before computer design programs when art was furnished to the printer on art boards, so the first step in the process was to shoot the art on our stat camera, and send the photos out to be drum scanned. State of the art stuff for the day. When the prepress people, who were called in the industry (don’t laugh) strippers, got the camera’s film and the film from the separator they had to strip it all together.  This required a different set of negatives for each color. Which were carefully taken over to a plate burner where the negatives were placed precisely over a printing plate and the images photographically etched onto the plate. Then the plate had to be developed. I could go on and on, but I’ve probably already put you to sleep so I’ll stop here.

miscommunications happen

Did you count the steps it took just to get a plate made, and the number of places where something could go wrong? The first possible communication error was between the customer and the graphic designer, the second between the photographer and the designer, and the third between me (the sales rep) and the designer. Another possible point of error is between the printer’s sales person and the estimator. Do you see where I’m going with this? If the job is miscommunicated up front, in any way, there isn’t anything you can do in the production to make it right. I often hear customers say, I don’t need a proof, just go on with the job. I understand, they are busy and don’t need any more to-do’s in their day, but proofs, and specs, and everything else we do to communicate the job are as necessary to the job performance as getting the art in the first place.

Ruined because of what?

Back to the brochure, after all those steps and I didn’t even enumerate what could go wrong on press, in the bindery, or even with delivery, after the job was delivered I got a phone call from the president of the company. He said, “This is a terrible brochure. You ruined what was supposed to be a showpiece for our company.”

I had samples on my desk and for the life of me couldn’t understand why he would be so upset. It was a beautiful piece. So I asked, “What exactly is the problem?”

He told me that his secretary’s dress came out too aqua it was really more of a royal blue color. I swear this is a true story! Her dress was the wrong shade of blue, are you kidding me? Assuming there was a real problem, where could it have taken a wrong turn? First if shot under fluorescent lights unless they are color corrected everything will be tinged with yellow. The color separator could have been adjusting for pleasing flesh tones and tweaked it a little off color. Printing is done with dots as I mentioned in an earlier blog (Sunday, February 15th, 2009), those dots are made with four pigments, CYMK. Not every color can be perfectly reproduced with those colors. Finally on press, the ink flow to the sheet is adjusted by the press operator to get the best result. Where did it go wrong-anywhere, nowhere.  The real question was did the brochure fulfill it’s purpose? Was it professionally produced in an accepted workmanlike manner? Yes and yes. Did any potential customer refuse to buy his product because of the color of the secretary’s dress? I don’t think so. His reaction was a bit over the top don’t you think? I wonder what was really going on?

He was

But again, Murphy was a printer. I swear that he was.