shoes and pie

Drew wisely asks, in a roundabout way, “If you’re so starved for sleep, why are you posting to your blog so much?”

My answer: Because I do have some down time between a lot of these checks, but it’s often only an estimated 20 minutes. I’ve learned that 20 minutes can usually mean an hour, but sometimes it turns out to actually mean 20 minutes. Not long enough to go back to the hotel and grab any meaningful shut-eye. There’s a very comfortable sofa at the printing plant, but the overhead intercom is very active and not conducive to napping. Also, I reach a point of being punch-drunk, and it can become difficult to actually fall asleep. Knowing that the phone is about to ring doesn’t make it any easier. So I stay awake during the shorter breaks. (On the other side of this coin, a one-hour break that I tried to nap through yesterday turned out to only be half an hour. It’s an uphill battle.) There’s a computer set up in the printing company’s client lounge, so I check my mail and I write bits and pieces of blog posts while I’m waiting for one press or another to be ready for me. Because WordPress auto saves, I can start a post on my laptop and finish it up in the lounge, or vice versa. This post, for instance, has taken (so far) three different rounds of attention over the course of a few hours.

And now it’s time to hit the button that says “Publish.”

I was originally scheduled to fly home on Thursday night; battered and exhausted but alive. And then the issue with the cover paper came up. Because I was awake and on-site when it happened, I knew about it seven hours before anyone at my “home” office. But I knew that email and voice mail was being left for the people who needed to know what was what.

I didn’t hear anything from my Creative Director, so I sent her an email directly to update her on the situation the following morning. I end it with “S.O.S.”

Still, I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t get any “instruction” as to my next move. Do I change my plane ticket to fit the new schedule? Well, the only other option is to not be here to press check the covers. And, since they’re the COVERS, I’m thinking they’re pretty important to look over in person.

I wait to see if anything is volunteered from Above. I suppose I could have asked directly, “what do you want me to do?,” but my Creative Director has previously mentioned to me that she wants me to take more “ownership” of my projects. And, honestly, with this little sleep, I’m not necessarily in peak cognitive form. So I decide to wait for direction as long as I reasonably can, and then this afternoon (after a whopping 30 minutes of sleep) I finally “take initiative” to contact the Travel Coordinator and ask her to look into what flights are available on Saturday. She gets back to me right away; there’s only one flight out on Saturday morning, so she booked it. I’m all proud of myself for Doing The Right Thing, even though I desperately want to go home on my original flight.

About an hour later, my print rep finally gets my CD on the phone and conferences me in.  We tell her that I’ve booked the hotel room for the extra night, and that the Travel Coordinator managed to find a Saturday flight. I’m not scolded directly, but her tone of voice is very “you shouldn’t have done that without discussing it with me.” I think that I am maybe taking it personally, but when the call was over, my print rep comes out to the lounge to speak with me, and he mentions her tone as well.

Now I’m grumpy again. At least the last three checks went really well. I have a couple more to squeeze in tonight, and then I have a break (SLEEEEEEEP!!!) before the covers start to run on the new paper that SHOULD be delivered tomorrow. At that point, my schedule is looking like:

• 10:30
• 11
• 11:30
• midnight
• 1
• 3
• 5:30
• 6:30
• 7:30
• 8
• 10
• 11
• 11:30
• 1:30
• 2
• 2:30
• 4
• 6
• 8
• 9:30
• 10
• 11
• midnight
• 1:30
• 2am, last call; you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here

I’m not very good with math, especially at the moment, but I think that’s 27.5 hours on press. There are a couple of 2-hour breaks in there, during which I can run back to the hotel for a shower, or grab a bite to eat. My flight out isn’t until 7:45, so if we don’t lose any time on press, I can grab an hour of sleep before we head to the airport. I hope to pass out on the plane, and then spend most of the weekend trying to get some sort of sane sleep pattern back.

________________

Yesterday was the four-year anniversary of the accident that totalled my little red car, and ‘permanently disfigured’ my leg. Not that I’m keeping track or anything.

________________

I’ve just received word from my cousin that my uncle (his father; my mom’s older brother) is in very poor health. I don’t want to jump to any dire conclusions just yet, but it’s really not looking good. Jahn should know more tomorrow, when he has another chance to speak with the doctor. More flights may be pending.

I might have to drink a lot this weekend.

This is what the press schedule looked like when I arrived in Wisconsin:

Monday

• 5:00 pm    16 pages
• 6:00 pm    12

Tuesday

• 1:00 am    24 pages
• 2:00 am   24
• 2:30 am    4
• 3:00 am    12
• 3:00 am    12
• 3:30 am    4
• 4:00 am    4
• 5:00 am    4
• 6:00 am    4
• 9:30 am    4
• 10:30 am    4
• 11:30 am    4
• noon        4
• 1:00 pm    4
• 2:00 pm    32
• 2:00 pm    4
• 3:00 pm    4
• 4:00 pm    4
• 4:00 pm    24
• 4:30 pm    24
• 4:30 pm    32
• 5:00 pm    12
• 6:00 pm    4
• 6:30 pm    4
• 8:00 pm    4
• 8:30 pm    4
• 9:30 pm    4
• 10:00 pm  32

Wednesday

•  1:00 am   4 pages
• 1:00 am    24
• 1:00 am    24
• 2:00 am    4
• 2:30 am    4
• 3:30 am    4
• 4:30 am    4
• 6:00 am    4
• 6:00 am    32
• 6:30 am    4
• 9:30 am    24
• 10:00 am    24
• noon    32
• 4:00 pm    24
• 5:00 pm    32
• 5:00 pm    24
• 7:00 pm    24
• 10:00 pm    32

There are a few issues with this schedule. For one thing, it’s very, very long. (Today I met Michelle, the woman doing the Pendleton check. She said she’d seen my schedule, and wanted to touch me to see if I was real.) The bigger issue lies with the fact that I cannot physically be on two different checks at the same time. And if you look closely at the schedule (and I don’t blame you if you don’t), you’ll notice that I am required to do exactly that. Even when the checks aren’t scheduled AT THE SAME TIME, they’re often only 30 or 60 minutes apart. Which would work only if we were able to approve the color on the first round, and not have to see any changes. Because you know what? That takes time. If a check goes smoothly, I’ll be on press for half an hour. 90% of the time, there is at least one photo that doesn’t want to land where I want it to, and a check can easily take 45 minutes while the press operators make adjustments and pull new proofs off of the press.

On the other hand… anything that says 4 pages is likely to be a cover, and my dedicated readers know that the covers have all been put on hold. The 12, 24 and 32 page folios are all shifting to use the available press time, and that means that my overlaps are falling away. I might have a 4-hour window for sleep tonight! HOWEVER, the covers will have to go on press eventually, and I will likely be here for an extra day. The down side to that is threefold: more time away from home, missing Erin’s holiday cocktail party, and not having a ride from the airport because every person who volunteered to pick me up will be at Erin’s holiday cocktail party (Meanwhile, I am grateful that THREE people volunteered to pick me up from the airport. Now THOSE are friends!).

I hope to know more about the new schedule in the morning, so I can call the Travel Coordinator back at the home office and have her change my plane ticket.

Sigh.

When last I left you, it was 9pm on Monday night and I was just laying down for a short Winter’s nap.

9pm is kinda early, and I’d had a full night’s sleep on Sunday, so it took me until  10 to finally nod off. My rep called me at 12:30 to come back in to view a cover, but by the time I got myself dressed and down to the plant, the press had gone down. But they’d be back up in 20 minutes. In pressman time, that means 40 minutes; still not long enough to nap. Time passed and that press wasn’t coming back up. I paced around the customer lounge until another press was ready with a different form, at 2:45.

It was while I was working on the 2:45 form that we found out what was happening with the cover. First, the pressmen thought they had some bad rollers. After swapping those out and getting similarly poor results, they realized it might be the paper. So they flipped the roll around… which confirmed that the paper was the culprit. What had been streaking on one side of the sheet was now streaking on the other. Some samples torn from a “good” roll and a “bad” roll showed how obvious the issue was: not only was the “bad” paper not the same brightness, but it felt… peculiar. Almost waxy. Like butcher paper. The foreman went and checked serial numbers, and it looked like 28 of our 30 rolls of cover stock were from the same waxy batch. When we finished the check, my rep started to make phone calls, but at 3am it’s kinda tough to get a hold of anybody.

Back to the hotel around 4, and back to bed. Dreamt of paper.

The next call was at 5:30, and this one was pretty close to target. I didn’t have to request a lot of moves, and I was asleep again by 7. Carol called at 7:30. I really don’t know how much clearer I can state this: DO. NOT. CALL. ME. ON. PRESS. CHECKS. Oh, my house is on fire? TOO BAD. There’s nothing I can do about it from here. Send me an email. To make matters worse, I didn’t have the phone number that she was looking for anyway.

Back to sleep, just in time for an 8am call. By this time, more people were involved with the funky paper situation. The plant’s paper buyer was in the office, weary and bedraggled looking, but he had already wisely called the EAST coast paper manufacturer’s offices, knowing that they’d be in the office an hour before anyone else. We had a new glimmer of hope, now: the paper we had was made on two different days, a week apart. So there was a very good chance that half of the “bad” paper might actually be okay to use. The schedulers had already taken our plates offline, but a Nordstrom print job was going to splice one of our rolls in to test. As my rep and I were walking off the press floor, I could hear the sirens that indicate a splice is happening.

By the time we’d walked to the other end of the plant, my rep got the call telling us that no, the potentially good paper was also bad. He made more phone calls, and we went to lunch.

Plug here for The Sawmill Inn. Always good food, always friendly service. Very important: they know how to keep a coffee cup filled. If you’re there for breakfast, make sure you order some locally-smoked Nueske’s bacon.

We got back to the plant in time for one more check, and some more discussion about the paper situation. If half of the batch was good, then we could have run the first set of covers, buying us time to get more paper in for the later-dated catalogs. Since that wasn’t the case, our options became:

1. change paper to something similar that the plant currently has available
2. get new paper delivered ASAP from the manufacturer
3. get new paper produced and delivered  from the manufacturer

Option three wouldn’t get paper to the plant until the 26th, which would mean missing our in-home date by about two weeks. That would be very, very bad. The best option for me, personally, is number one. That way, I can keep going with a slightly altered schedule and still hopefully make my flight out of here. But, with our FSC certification, we need to be verrrrrry careful about what we switch to.

Right now, my big concern is taking a shower. It’s been too long since I’ve had a chance, and I have this unexpected window of opportunity because my next call isn’t estimated for another hour and a half.

For anyone trying to keep track, I’ve accumulated nearly 5 hours of scattered sleep. Not bad, actually.

Did I mention the six or so inches of heavy, wet snow that’s fallen so far today? Another excellent reason to stay at the closer hotel.

Okay, when I was explaining the deal with press checks, I made the comment that I live my life an hour at a time while doing these. Which is true, but I didn’t mean that I was actually ON PRESS every hour, just that I am constantly receiving schedule updates. I’m actually on press every, say, three hours. For about an hour each time.

I just got a look at the remainder of the schedule for this trip. 48 forms in 4 days. I can’t even visually take in all the times; the numbers started swimming on the page. As a comparative example, there’s a Pendleton catalog being printed while I’m here. That one has six forms. Six. To my 48. Why 48? Because I’m here checking on two different catalogs, and each of those catalogs has four or five versions, depending on when it’s scheduled to land in mailboxes.

We’re running these catalogs on four presses at the same time. Which is great, because I’m in and out of here in one week, instead of two. However… it’s a very solid week. I’m currently on an unplanned break, because the paper snapped during my 7pm check. It runs through the presses at 2300 feet per minute while I’m approving color, and if the tension isn’t juuuuust right… well, you don’t want to be in the way. It would be one nasty paper cut. Once I can sign off on it, I’m going straight to bed… my next check is at 1am 11pm/midnight, and they’re running every 30 to 60 minutes after that until 10pm tomorrow night. At which point I have a “break” until 1am. Woo, gonna get me a NAP.

9pm. I’m going to hit the hay and try to get some sleep while I can. Thinking happy sleepy thoughts!