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Originally Posted by Vanguard
His reply, "I don't like to read."
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At PCC/Artwork Systems training 6-7 years ago, back when Ted was still doing draining, he asked us on the first day if anyone in the class was named Fred. No? Ok, good, because he liked to use "Freddie" as his example when pointing to a prepress technician who doesn't like to read. Or think.
We had a pair of Freddies when I started, 7 years ago, one is still around. I called them the Mopsey Twins. They had this deal, their Innovative Cutting Edge Prepress Initative, that consisted of saving every Quark file they got to a Quark eps, then opening the eps in Illustrator 6. (Illustrator 8 had been out for months, but that's another issue. We all hated 7.)
They had never bothered to learn Quark. Instead they made incredible messes of the client's work. Quark's non-standard Postscript epses suck, and have sucked even worse since about 1992 when Postscript Level 2 came out (Q epses stayed at Level 1 until 6.0) So these guys were ruining jobs - what should have been smooth blends (on 8' silkscreen jobs) showed big-time banding, since PS level 1 only supports 256 shades of grey. The type jumped all around and the letterspacing went kerblooie. All the spots were tintstripped. No registration color! No image links! Bounding boxes from the Quark "conversion" in the way all over the place.
I couldn't believe I was seeing this and bugged the manager until he, very reluctantly, called a meeting. I made my statement about the unprofessional and unreliable technique they were using, they replied that "it works fine for us." One of them yelled at me "you're just a typesetter. If you knew anything at all about Illustrator you'd see what a great idea this is!" I'd been using Illustrator since Illustrator 88 came out, about when these guys were in highschool printing shop classes.
When I pointed out that I was seeing press sheets out in the pressroom with the type scrunched together and shoved apart - one of the more exciting aspects of this cutting edge idiocy - they shouted, in unison, like they'd practiced it:
"No one ever looks at this stuff! The clients don't care!"
Then the boss called for a vote. A vote! Two for, two against, one abstention. Ok, they could keep doing it, but only when, in their professional judgement, it was absolutely necessary. Right. Nothing changed.
Two years later, after requesting our post-production files, a major client instructed their separator to send us locked pdfs. Our management went ballistic. The client responded that they'd discovered that we were converting their Quark files to Illustrator and that they were very upset about this.
I was called into the office for a conference call with the separator. I got to hear all this first-hand. Oh boy, I thought. Now maybe this lunacy will stop. Not so fast, typeboy. The plant manager threw it back in the clients face and said we'd do whatever we felt like doing with their files, and they'd just have to send us the native files. Their business then fell way off. We still don't get nearly as much of it as we did. They do a lot of printing. We're doing less and less. It's like working for neo-cons. Ideology trumps competence and common sense.
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