Ready to get OUT of the business ...

[kaiserwilhelm]

Re: Ready to get OUT of the business ...

Now that takes a real man.
I never read your post. All I can say
is that if more Christians practiced this we might
not be accused of being hypocrites.

Chris

 

[ian]

Re: Ready to get OUT of the business ...

Hey Bruce.. I dont think its a matter or money for training clients, we trained 10 clients a couple of years ago. 6 months after the training we lost every client. After talking to all the clients about the move, I was told they dont need us anymore to fix and correct their files hence they are always shopping for the lowest price. We have gone back to the old habits of fixing client files as a free service and not teaching them how to do it them selves.

amin

 

[MagMan]

Re: Ready to get OUT of the business ...

amin, I see your point about training customers and then they leave you. But some of these customer files are unrepairable. When you tell them that all their photos are low res and they say that is all they have. I have seen customers get really upset. When you fix these files for free do you tell them what you had to fix?

 

[kasaky]

Re: Ready to get OUT of the business ...

Funny... here in Mexico, It´s the other way around. I learned prepress at school, and once I was out I thought "man you´re hot stuff" because you know better than converting whole pages of type to outlines or whatever

and then you face the local printing industry, with their corel draw and illustrator 9.

There was this one guy whose computer couldn´t even read a PDF (Readable in Acrobat 4 for god´s sake) sent it over to a fellow printer who couldn´t read it either and they came up to me

"you know son this wouldnt happen if you gave us a corel file with the type converted to outlines"

 

[tmiller_iluvprinting]

Re: Ready to get OUT of the business ...

Don,
I think it was just good, spirited discussion, and I don't fault you in any way. Good luck with your future endeavors, your input to these forums will be missed!

Very best regards,
Todd

 

[Franknater]

Re: Ready to get OUT of the business ...

I think Don was just removing some old posts on the thread alone.

To make a long story short or a short story long, I'm ready to move on. With all the education in this field and getting no respect, including "insulting interviews", I'm really looking at other types of employment.

For now, I've quit my job. Most of the employees there respected each other, but the owner...well, if I can't say something nice, I'll just be quiet.

Frank

 

[Jlong]

Re: Ready to get OUT of the business ...

I too have run into such clients. It is always better to educate if you can. Saves the headaches in the future.
A comment that goes with this is that software, society and such make it that they dummy everything down and then wonder why no one knows how to do anything.
Pet Peeve! You can always have them send you the native files and do a collect for output from Quark that way you have the editing capabilities (providing they even know where they imported their pictures from). If they were updated they should be able to collect and then sent the files to you.

We all have days we wonder why we are in printing.....

 

[truetype1]

Re: Ready to get OUT of the business ...

I feel your pain. I once had a client tell me that they used RGB files because they were smaller, taking up less server space. They never knew that we had to convert them to cmyk before we ripped em.

 

[Helmet_of_Poe]

Re: Ready to get OUT of the business ...

I share your collective pain, and at times have gone further than just mumbling under my breath about how idiotic "designers" are about file prep. But each time this occurs I remind myself that each individual in the process shares the same goals, to get the job printed and to get paid for the work. That crappy designer just wants to get the job done and get paid. The sales person that brought the job in just wants to get the job finished and get paid. The owner, the pressman, the cutter operator, even us in prepress just want to get the job out of the door and get paid.

These are not lofty goals. It's not Earth science or quantum physics, it's just printing. We owe everything to the sales people that bring these crappy jobs in, they're keeping us employed. We wouldn't be kept on the payroll to play Freecell all day if the work wasn't here. And I wouldn't change places with the owner for anything. Consider for one second the stress that they are under to make equipment payments, pay taxes, pay for the building and utilities, oh, and make payroll, too. Makes my job pretty cut and dry; fix the files and get them to press. Yes, sometimes I'll have to talk "designers" through the file prep stage, but that's sort of fun anyway and I'll charge for my time. All of the education we dole out comes at a price, and someone's going to have to pay for it. If any of you guys have jobs you don't want to tackle, send them to me, we'll get them printed and make a little profit. That's what we do.

By the way, I realize this sounded a little preachy...it wasn't suppose to. I realize, too, that this was a gripe session, and that we all deserve to get a few things off our chest from time to time. But we should think about who we're taking pot shots at before we bite the hand that feeds us. Yes?