Category
iVend
I was walking through the Dallas airport yesterday and noticed a vending machine for iPods and accessories. I walked over and checked it out. It had all the goodies: video iPods, Shuffles, Nanos and various cases, cords, etc.
My first thought was that I don’t have enough quarters for the 80 gig video version, and even if I did, would I have enough time to drop all 1,396 of them into the slot. That’s when I noticed that Apple had the foresight to put a credit card reader in the machine.
My second thought was of the bag of M&Ms I didn’t get the day before from one of these darn machines.
I can just picture myself shaking it, screaming at it to “give me my iPod…give it to me now!!!” …repeatedly pushing the Coin Return button…sticking my finger in the hole over and over just to see. Shaking it and yelling at it some more “You piece of crap vending machine from hell…give me my $349 iPod.”
Wouldn’t be funny if the iPod was $349 but they added $9.95 for shipping and handling…that’s an expensive drop.
They’ll vend anything, these days. I’ve seen Ice cream, phone cards, personal hygiene products, baseball cards, candy, drinks and Motorola phones.
I think they should have a machine to vend small domestic animals…Vend-A-Pet. Of course the fish would have to be on the bottom row, so the tanks don’t break when they drop out of the little spiral holder thing. It would also make sense to put the cats on top, as it is well documented that cats have an incredible ability to land safely from very high altitudes. Also in there would be puppies, turtles, snakes and ferrets all looking cute behind the glass, begging for freedom.
I do believe that the behavior of a vending machine is directly driven by your Karma. Good karma = treat, bad karma = tough titty, no M&Ms for you, pal. If I ever get ripped off by a machine, the first thing I do is look internally. I go inside myself and examine my behavior over the past 24 hours and I reflect on the cars I cut off trying to exit the freeway, elderly people I didn’t help across the street or not feeling sorry for Anna Nichol Smith and her mess of a life the world seems so interested in. I don’t feel sorry for Phil Spectre, either.
So, before I ever approach an iPod vend-o-matic and pump in 350 smackers, I better have behaved like a cub scout the week before.
Watching the Clock
Have you ever done things the hard way?
You know, like the project where the customer wanted extra space between paragraphs, so you put in an extra hard return after each? The when the customer wanted a little less space, so you went in and selected the returns and dropped the leading…line… by line… by line… for over an hour. Then when you showed the proof, they asked for a little MORE space.
Then you discovered the Space Before/Space After feature…ouch!
Or remember discovering Style Sheets AFTER you completed the 120 page directory with last names and phone number in bold…and the customer changed their minds on fonts 53 times?
Oh, the pain.
But what about the people who do these things on purpose?
I was at a publishing company once and help one of the employees set up a way to automate a lot of the card creation, only to go back a month later and he wasn’t using it. He said “Well, I wasn’t getting in my 40 hours, so I just went back to the old way.”
Go figure.
Have are you guilty of using the Delete Anchor Point Tool in Illustrator to get rid of all those extra points on a path instead of Object> Path> Simplify, the whole time watching the clock for five o’clock to roll around?
So, whether you have a war story of how you USED to do things the slow way or a technique on doing things the slow way just to get in the hours, please let us hear them. Or, you may have a slow technique to share just to be stupid…we welcome that, too.
If we use your suggestion or story in a podcast or cartoon, we’ll send you a free Deadlines Suck! T-shirt… and who doesn’t want one of these?
C’mon… I know you all have some great submissions. If you are too shy to post, feel free to email the story to me and I’ll post it for you, under an assumed name. Or you can start your post with “I have a friend who…
I have to tell you, I can’t wait to hear from you on this one.
Let’s Help Apple Out
With the recent announcement of iPhone, Apple has added yet another product in its long line of “i” gadgets. There is no question the iMac, iTunes and iPod have revolutionized the world as we knew it and they are hoping to do the same with their version of the cell phone, the iPhone.
I fear, however, that Apple is running out of ideas for more “i” products, and I think it’s up to us, the clever and consuming public, to create a comprehensive list of new gadget proposals.
I’ll start.
Digging through the print museum
I finally found Jesus.
That’s right, I found Jesus. I was getting ready for my move to Austria, going through every box and drawer in my old house and there he was…the baby Jesus for our Nativity that we’ve been without for a couple of Christmases.
In addition to Jesus, I my old waxer. It was the Lectro Stix Waxer with an extra box of wax. The box boasts the waxer is “skid proof” and “cuts paste-up time in half.” Good stuff.
The box of wax promotes the advantages of Lectro Stix Wax over the competition: “Micro-crystalline wax! Provides a dry-to-the-touch, easy-to-handle adhesive coat that slides easily into position…in contrast to tackier waxes that need synthetic additives to make them stick.” And don’t forget, Lectro Stix Wax’s “bond is positionable—yet lasting.”
Things that Customers Never Say
With my head in the clouds, I dream of things customers might someday say to me…when I die and go to heaven, perhaps.
Usually we get stuff like “I need it yesterday” and “I can get it cheaper from the other guy.”
Do let’s daydream a minute and think of the many things we would like to hear our customers say, like:
1. No Hurry…take your time
2. Other quotes? I didn’t even know there were other printers in town.
3. Just tell me how much it costs when I pick it up.
4. That misregistration is hardly noticeable.
5. I love black ink.
6. Don’t worry about it…I always type my phone number wrong, too.
7. Can I do the press proof over the phone?
8. If you like it, I like it.
9. All those specs confuse me…why don’t you choose for me.
10. Deadline? I don’t want to sound stupid, but I don’t know what that is.
11. Missing photo? Oh that? I didn’t like that picture anyway.
12. Can I pay you in advance? Cash?
13. WOW…look at the big dots in the photos…I like that!
14. What’s wrong with Helvetica?
15. Proof? Nah, I trust you.
Printers You Can Trust
Here is a list I compiled of the best printers in the United States and Canada. If you can’t find anyone here to do the job right, you’re too picky.
Lower your standards just a bit and give your business to one of the fine establishments listed below.
• Hickey’s Printing
• Better Late Than Never Litho
• Skip & Skeeter’s Bait, Beer, Printing & Jerky
• Dead Trees & Poisonous Chemicals Fine Lithography
• You’ll Get It When We’re Darn Good ‘n’ Ready Print Crafters
• Hot Lead & Parchment Printhouse
• Sweaty’s Stinky-Print
• It’s Not Our Fault Litho
• Tortoise’s Steady-Print
• Looks Good To Me Litho
• Dickey’s Letterpress, Offset, Flexo, Silkscreening & Tattoo Parlor
• Deadlines Schmeadlines
• Plates ‘R’ Us
• Rollers ‘n’ Things
• Freddie’s Fast & Cheap Printing… “We’re fast & cheap”
• We Just Bought a Mac Litho
• Any Color As Long As It’s Black Litho
• Bubba’s Big Press
• Helga’s Haus of Heidelbergs
• Moirès & More
If I only had a G5 with Creative Suite 2 in the 80s
Often I think back to the early days…not wood or lead type…not that early. My early days, when I used to use a CompuGraphic MDT350 to write my stories. Or my old Nikon Nikkormat film cameras…and layout boards…and line tape…
Or what about PageMaker 1.0…on a PC 286AT…with run-time Windows…and a 300dpi laser printer? Ahh…those were the days.
I was thinking about one of my first freelance projects using PageMaker on that old machine, and I remembered that it had a memory limit. Not based on RAM or Harddrive space, but a limit within the program.
It would happen something like this: you’d be typing along, working on page 25 of the document and all of a sudden…POW!!!…a message would pop up…mid-sentance…saying “you have reached your memory limit” or something to that affect.
So now what do you do? Delete enough characters to work, save the document, do a save as and break your document into two parts. Eventually I had broken my 120 page catalog into six 20-page docs.
Aaaahhhh…the good ol’ days.
And what about the speed? Outputting the final pages at a blistering 1 page every day.
There was the project where I wanted to put the page number inside a circle. When I printed the page out, they weren’t arranged like they were on my monitor. To make it work, I had to move the page number until it looked good on the printout…which, of course, meant the file on screen looked like a train wreck.
Remember Photoshop pre-Layers…and pre-Actions…and pre-History? Oh yeah…they weren’t always there.
It doesn’t take long for my thoughts to move to “What if I had a time machine? What if I could go back to the 80s with a G4 laptop, loaded with Creative Suite 2? What would that do to the competition?”
Oh, I know it’s just a pipe dream, but it’s still fun to think about how different things would be.
I think of how I really could have used things like Object Styles, Snippets, Anchored Objects and the eyedropper over the past two decades.
One thing that hasn’t change, though. I think it’s funny when I hear people say “This Creative Suite is so easy to use and so powerful, now everyone is going to think they’re a designer.” Well, I’ll tell you…I heard that back in the mid 80s at the birth of the Desktop Publishing age.
These faster computers and more powerful software programs don’t magically make people designers…they just help people create crap faster than ever before.
So tell us what it would have been like for you if you had a G5 with Creative Suite 2 in the 80s…or the 90s for that matter.
It’s hard to sound tough and say Snippet…
Widgets was already taken…as were Sniglets and bonbons. So what was left for this wonderful new creation from the Adobe Gods? Snippets.
Hmmm…I’m sure there were a lot of people sitting around a big table discussing this at length before settling on that name.
I actually like the name, but it’s hard to sound tough when saying it. There are lots of tough names in the Adobe world. Actions, Clone Stamp, Master Pages to name a few. But snippets isn’t one of them…but then neither is Droplet…or dongle.