I work in a print center that is funded by a university. Basically, all the small walk-in customers don’t make us money, nor do we need them. This gives me a little leeway when it comes to customer service.

We had this old guy who would come in to print stuff. He would always try to talk to our managers because they were men, and the rest of us were women. When the managers were gone, he would be rude to the employees and complain.

One night, he comes in while I’m alone, helping two other customers. They are Asian and Black. He places himself in front of them and acts like they aren’t there.

I tell him he will have to wait because I am helping them first.

Customer: “It doesn’t matter. They’re darker-skinned and used to waiting.”

Honestly, I’m so thrown off by his outright racism that all I say is:

Me: “Please move, and I’ll be with you in a second.”

I finish helping the two customers, and they move to the side to look at their prints. The old guy comes up and hands me his flash drive.

Me: “What’s the file name, and how would you like it printed?”

Customer: “You’re stupid. You should know these things.”

Me: “I don’t appreciate the way you’re talking to me.”

He continues to berate me for a bit. Once I finally get a word in:

Me: “I won’t be printing your things. You need to leave.”

This throws him over the edge because we’re the only print shop open that late, and he needs his stuff printed by tomorrow morning.

Me: “If you want my help, you can go outside, turn your attitude around, and come back once you’ve apologized.”

He leaves. I apologize to the earlier customers, and they tell me that if he makes a complaint, they will back me up on what happened. After they leave, the old guy comes back.

Customer: “What’s your name? I want to know your name.”

Me: “My name is [My Name], and my manager’s name is [Manager’s Name]. Feel free to talk to him later.”

He tries to hand me his flash drive again.

Me: “I need that apology first.”

He becomes flustered again.

Customer: “You’re a disrespectful little girl!”

Me: “I’m a college-aged woman, and I honestly could not care less. You need to leave now. If you ever come back, I will call security.”

He stormed out, shouting various bigotries (sex, race, I think he even called me a lesbian) and vowed to be back to get me fired. I called my manager, who was working the next morning, and told him what happened. He said if he came back tomorrow (when I wasn’t working), that he would deal with it.

Apparently, he was there when the store opened that morning; he really needed that stuff printed! My manager recognized him (he’d reviewed the store footage on his phone – wonders of modern technology!) and just said:

Manager: *Holding up phone.* “The only thing I’m printing right now is this image of a dude along with the words ‘banned for life’.”

According to my manager, he stormed out again, spouting even more bigotries. I was upgraded from just a lesbian b**** to a disabled slur plus a man hater… oh, and we were all communists for some reason.

This story reminded me of my own time when someone tried to help despite my objections.

Years into my job as a copy jockey at a print shop, I had a good grasp of what my regular customers wanted and what to look out for if something wasn’t right with a file. Sometimes files don’t export properly, especially back in the days of Windows ME. Sometimes people don’t realize their graphics are too low resolution to print without looking pixelated. And our boss was in charge of quality control, whether we wanted him to do it or not.

Like clockwork, a regular customer comes in to order a very large banner from us for a time-sensitive event. And lucky for us, we had just enough banner material on the roll to print their job with just a few feet to spare. We had already ordered more, but it was on backorder and wasn’t going to get to us until after their event ended. So I had to be extra, extra careful that it printed properly. I stood by the printer to make sure it was printing correctly and rolled it loosely as it came out to prevent the printed side from dragging over the floor. 

After it was printed, I took it to the trimmer to gently hand-trim the white edges. It genuinely took me half an hour to make sure my cuts were straight and that I didn’t scuff the printed side. Last was the grommet punch, which is where things started to go wrong.

The boss was watching me do this, periodically guiding away oblivious customers who were trying to place an order with an employee who was very obviously busy. Then he notices it.

Boss: “What happened here?”

Me: *Panicking because I was nearing the finish line with my work.* “What? Where?”

Boss: “The printer left a blue streak across the banner.”

Me: *Calming down.* “That’s a lens flare. I pointed it out to the customer, and he said it’s supposed to be there. It’s a part of the design.”

Boss: *Scrunches face.* “It doesn’t look right to me. I can use a marker to make it blend in with the black background.”

Me: “It does look better on the screen, but it’s going to be hanging up really high. The customer tried to get a higher resolution PDF for us, but they couldn’t get it to render without their computer crashing.”

Boss: “Believe me, when he sees how I fixed their banner, he’ll love it.”

Me: “Please don’t. He specifically said that he wanted that lens flare. He worked really hard to get that file to us like this.”

Boss: “I don’t—”

Me: “I’m begging you, please don’t. At least wait until he sees the banner first before doing anything with it. I don’t have enough material to reprint if he doesn’t like it.”

Boss: “Okay. But I know he’s going to hate this thing. When he stops by, offer to draw a mini section with the marker to show him how it would look better.”

By then, I’ve finished the banner, rolled it up, and stored it away for pick up. The boss drops the topic and goes to help the next customer.

At that point, I am exhausted. I had just spent an hour wrestling with a fifteen-pound pile of vinyl fabric as it printed, unrolling and rerolling it multiple times to get it cut and grommeted. My stomach was growling, telling me I was late for my break.

I’m sure you all can already figure out what was going to happen.

By the time my fifteen-minute paid break was over, I emerged from the break room to discover that my boss had already unrolled the banner, draped it across the front counter, and was having a go at it with a marker.

And it looked bad. The shiny black marker he had used was a huge contrast to the muted black of the printed background. And the line as wiggly as the Mississippi River. There were scuff marks from where it had collided with the metal wastebasket next to the counter. More marks from where the buttons on his sleeves had dragged across the print image. Crimp marks from where the banner had folded over itself while he was moving it. Parts of the ink had been smudged where he had been pawing at it as well, smearing it into the white print.

Me: “Did the customer approve this when I was on break?”

Boss: “Look at how great this looks! He’ll never be able to tell that there was a printing error on his banner.”

Me: “That wasn’t a printing error. It was a part of the design. He’s going to refuse to pay for that.”

Boss: “Well. We’ll see when he picks it up. My shift’s over, so I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Me: *Internally.* “I’m going to have to give him a refund.”

And I did have to refund it. The customer was just as perplexed as I was when I related to him what had happened. Luckily, the customer was a regular, was familiar with how the bosses could get, and was on friendly terms with me. And because the boss wasn’t around, we both made fun of his antics to blow off our mutually derived frustrations. Including jokes about how I should have strapped the banner to my body like it was a newborn baby while I was on break.

I work in a print shop, and my boss is a huge control freak and also a know-it-all. One day, she got tired of me questioning her orders and told me:

Boss: “You are no longer allowed to question what I tell you. Just shut up and do what you’re told.”

A couple of hours later, an invitation came in from the non-profit group that she’s a member of. In the customer’s email, the location of the event was spelled correctly. But she thought it was wrong, and rather than googling it, she just made me change it to what she thought it was supposed to be.

So, having been told to shut up and do what I was told, I did. And we printed 150 invitations with the WRONG event venue name on them and delivered them to the organization.

The organization that she was a part of.

The next day, they called, upset because they had sent us the correct information and got cards with the wrong info.

Boss lady asked me what happened:

Boss: “What happened here?”

Me: “You told me to change it. So, I didn’t question it; I just did what you told me.”

And the funny thing? She was donating the job. So now it cost her TWICE as much.

I’m the supervisor in the prepress department of a small printing company. My now-long-gone supervisor used to storm in regularly and start screaming at me.

Supervisor: “Prepress has screwed up this job, and you need to figure out how it happened and make sure it never happens again!”

So I’d put on my Sherlock Holmes hat and chase down the history of the job (not really my job, but I’m really good at it) and twenty minutes later figure out that in 99% of cases it wasn’t the prepress department’s fault at all. In fact, a good 75% of them were this guy’s fault!

I’d show him the trail, and instead of apologizing for accusing us of something we weren’t responsible for, he’d just yell:

Supervisor: “Well, how am I supposed to know?”

Me: “Yes, exactly. Why would you know who the culprit is before we figured it out? And why would you repeatedly come in here and scream as though you know where the problem occurred instead of acting like, you know ‘We have an issue and I’d like your help figuring it out,’ when you know I’m just going to point out something you don’t want to hear?”

This happened so many times over the years that I quit caring about it.

Sometimes he’d tell me he needed a job fixed (not my fault, but he’d sure act like it was) and then instead of walking away and letting me take care of it, he’d stand over my shoulder yelling:

Supervisor: “We have a pressman out there with his thumb up his a** not doing anything, making [amount] per hour to stand around on the company’s dime while you guys are in here goofing off?”

This rant would continue the entire time I would work on the fix, and I heard the exact speech about three or four times a year in my tenure at the company.

Of course, this practice makes it darn near impossible to actually concentrate on fixing a (usually very complicated) problem.

He did this one too many times.

Supervisor: “Prepress screwed this up, and I need a new plate for the pressman!”

I pull up the job ticket to see what’s required, and he starts laying into me (again, not my fault, but he needs a whipping boy), and I turn to my computer, pull up a giant stopwatch on my monitor, and start it. Then I stop working and turn away from the computer to give him my undivided attention.

His eyes goggle.

Supervisor: “What are you doing?”

Me: “You say you want me to fix this job. But I can’t concentrate on it while you’re ranting. I’m not going to make a mistake, so you can run screaming in here again. Why don’t you get your rant out of your system so I can get a plate to the pressman so he can take his thumb out of his a** and actually do some work on the company’s dime?”

That’s the last time he ever read me that particular riot act speech but, unfortunately, he never learned that treating your coworkers like they’re your teammates would have given him much better results.

I work in a stationery and print shop behind the counter. A man walks in with a USB stick and an extremely specific request. 

Customer: “I need these two-hundred flyers printed, but they have to be on ivory cardstock, double-sided, edge-to-edge color. I need them in about twenty-five minutes. Can you do that?”

Me: “We can definitely print double-sided edge-to-edge on cardstock, but ivory cardstock is special order. We only carry white and off-white in stock. And we’d need a few hours for that many full-color prints to dry properly before handling.” 

Customer: “I don’t understand. I got them printed here last year just fine.”

Me: “That may be, but it must’ve been on different paper or a longer turnaround. We haven’t stocked ivory cardstock for months.” 

Customer: “Look, I work in finance. I know how timelines work. You can rush anything if the price is right.”

Me: “Well, I work in printing, and I know how ink works. I could rush it, but then I’d be handing you two hundred expensive Rorschach tests.”

He accepted the more realistic turnaround time. 

Related:
Think Before You Ink, Part 12
Think Before You Ink, Part 11
Think Before You Ink, Part 10
Think Before You Ink, Part 9
Think Before You Ink, Part 8