Just another day

Dear god, it's only Tuesday. Really, I want it to be Friday. It feels like a Friday; I've had a week's worth of problems at work in a day and a half and it's mostly because of me being the middle man communicator between our customer's and my boss.

The VNA job requires a live card sample to be approved before we affix to the carriers. Well the cards that were run were not run well. There was a line halo on the shadows behind the people and I didn't look at the samples I grabbed before I sent them. So intially this situation is partly my fault, I should have looked closer at them. By now I should know better than to trust the press operators to print quality jobs. Anyway so our contact for this job calls me up with this problem and I tell him that I will send him new samples after we check the rolls and throw away the bad stuff. The master roll finally gets to the slitter and the operator goes through the whole thing and it's all no good. The entire 5000 piece run is bad. So I pull the absolute best looking cards I can find and there is no halo on them, just the shadow behind their heads but the shadow is a bit dark. When I ask my boss about it she says to send 4 from the batch she signed off on before the press run. While I'm telling her he asked for 30 samples she is shaking her head at me and points to the four and says send those. Well crap. So I can piss off the customer or piss off my boss. What a great feeling that is! I decide to go with what the boss lady says because she can always smooth things over with the customer.

He calls while I'm at lunch. He's unhappy that I only sent the four but that while they look tons better the right side is slightly darker than the left. He wants to come in and look at what we've run and I freeze. My brain stops working because what we've run is trash. It's no good. If he sees the whole job has that line halo he will be pissed beyond words and we could lose his business. I tell him I need to make sure that someone would be available to show him the rolls here at our plant and that I'll call him back. Shit. He has to know that something is going on. I don't know enough about the press to be able to lie and assure a customer sufficiently. Luckily, boss lady will be talking with the customer rep when he comes in at 15:30.

Boss lady has a weird filing system too. She was looking for files I was keeping for when we receive invoices and she ended up just taking them all. I think she was none too happy with how I had the files but she puts them through too many unnecessary steps when I just put them all together until I receive the invoice and then they go to A/P. It's easy and they are all in the same place. I am getting frustrated because there are hardly any written in stone procedures for anything. And it is impossible to get any of the office training from start to finish. You start with the end of a process and then you learn the beginning and then learn the middle, then you learn what to do before a process starts. GAH! When quoting our prices to customers, there are more ways that are done than there are people to work on quotes. Yes, that's right individuals are not consistent in how they quote. I would love to have set standards and formulas that we use. One of the things that really drives me mad is two of the quoters will quote per thousand form on multiple up forms when we should be quote per thousand card. We are, after all, a card company NOT a forms company.

Got back from a tour meeting with one of suppliers. We buy our thermal and impact print ribbon from them and they wanted to see what we do. That was enjoyable. They were trying to sell us on RFID for our company but they were talking to the wrong people. If it were up to me I would have signed up on the spot, but that is a decision for the owners. The paperwork we keep around could be cut significantly with some sort of scanning system for production and shipping. Be easier to keep track of orders. But, not my decision.

There are other orders that are driving me bonkers. The forms people are really slow at getting proofs back. I don't know if it is because they are busy or just because it is standard practice. I have two orders from this same company and both orders need to be done NOW but they only gave us 2 weeks lead time. We really need a month, especially when we are taking care of the forms. I cannot wait for those orders to be completed and filed away. I don't understand why we don't get the software to complete all the pre-press proofing and re-proofing in house. We would save money and so much time, and I would be very willing to learn the software. I wish I knew of a way to present that idea to the boss lady so she doesn't nix it outright.

I'm ready to go home.