spoiled chinese girl

Just so this doesn’t confuse people, I lost this job on Oct 27th due to some bullshit excuses that really equate to there being not enough work to have hired me in the first place.

The things that I can learn keeping my ears open around my work place are… scary. And astounding.  The fact that the walls are so thin/hollow that you can hear someone sneeze 3 offices down is quite scary.

I find it really creepy when I’m talking to a customer over the phone, then have my boss (who’s got the office next to me) asking me about said customer’s conversation and what the dealio’s going on.

Anyways, here are a few gems from the first week at work (way back when!)

• Owner berating tech support for a web-development issue, using all the same “customer is always right” BS that I’m sure we’d all be familiar with.
• Customers having a misunderstanding over their printed project when someone forgot to approve something… or something.  I think they’re both wrong, the company shouldn’t have started printing without a signature, but that guy shouldn’t have been allowed to leave without providing it.
• Manager disputing a Netflix charge on his credit card, because he didn’t realize that after the free trial was over, they would start charging him if he didn’t call back to cancel. And didn’t. Apparently for months. Why he was being charged $40 something (I think 47 dollars a month) is beyond me though.
• One of my bosses apparently goes to bed at 8:30-9:00pm every night. But he’s able to arrange a meeting with someone on a weekend because that bedtime isn’t as important on the weekends.
• Someone’s planning on going on vacation, and renting a cottage of some sort. Making sure that it would sleep at least 6 people, and they want to go during the winter holidays.

Really. I can hear all of this stuff.

Just so this doesn’t confuse people, I lost this job on Oct 27th due to some bullshit excuses that really equate to there being not enough work to have hired me in the first place.

This one… I’m not even sure where to begin.

A quote request comes in, in big bold capital letters (the whole e-mail was written this way actually)

CALENDAR DESK PADS

17 x 22

14 SHEETS PER PAD.

EACH SHEET A DIFFERENT PRINT.

ENGLISH (Qty) + FRENCH (Qty)

So I go about my quote, do it up, then needed to ask the boss for his opinion, since putting something like this together is a bit of a PITA, I wanted his opinion on how to price it. He tells me to go away and he’ll look at it later. So I leave all the information with him.

Then he calls me.

Boss: Why are you adding collating? They’re just pads!

Est: They want to make those big desk top calendars. Every sheet is supposed to be a different month.

Boss: He doesn’t say that anywhere! He just wants pads!

Est: I thought I saw 14 different prints somewhere, and the customer mentioned it’s a calendar.

Boss: I think he just wants a normal pad! I’ll go call him to confirm. This doesn’t look right.

I don’t know if he really called the guy or not. But some time later, he comes and gives me back my quote saying “Okay I added the price for the collating for you. Fix the quote and give it back to me to check again.”

*headdesk*

Just so this doesn’t confuse people, I lost this job on Oct 27th due to some bullshit excuses that really equate to there being not enough work to have hired me in the first place.

So after we figured out that the tabbing thing was what I thought it was… now to figure out how to price it.

The way the boss-man was going on about it, you think I was trying to give him a price for selling off his first born for slave labour in the Alsaka oil sands or something…

I just proceeded to come up with the solution of “What about if we charged 5 cents for each tab?”  Trying to make it nice and easy for me. And him. Since it seems I had more experience with this type of finishing service.

My math:

5 cents x 20,000 tabs required = $1,000.00

He refused. Point blank.  Claiming how it wouldn’t work. How it’s more complicated then that. How there are methods to how things get calculated around here.

So he started on his calculator.

20,000 / 10 (inserted tabs per minute) / 6 (units of 10 in an hour) x $30.00/hour =… $999.99(99999)

I kept seeing a string of 9′s on his calculator thinking he was giving himself an error message.  I watched him type his formula into his calculator 4 or 5 times.  Until I realized his result was exactly the same as mine (ignoring the 0.000000000…1 cent difference)  He looked at me with a weird “WTF How did you do that?” kind of look on his face. Again.

I admit, I giggled a little inside.

Just so this doesn’t confuse people, I lost this job on Oct 27th due to some bullshit excuses that really equate to there being not enough work to have hired me in the first place.

A part of me feels this is different strokes for different folks, but I’ve come to accept that some things in the printing industry are universal truths.

Terminology being one of them.

I had a customer (Who I knew from a previous company, and was ecstatic to hear from me) ask for the pricing on a particular service to be done.

It’s called tabbing.

Tabbing is basically counting out the press sheets, and jamming a little card to mark off every X amount of sheets.

Being my first week, I wasn’t sure just how the company wanted to handle something so boring yet crucial to the quote. So I asked.

And I was told that tabbing is something completely different.  That already has it’s own very universally accepted term.

WTF?

I could sort of understand a printing n00b trying to get away with such an explanation… but the owner of the company who’s been at this longer than I’ve been alive? Really?

Whats worse is he wouldn’t believe me. Made me go (look like an idiot to my friendly neighbourhood customer) and ask them exactly the description of what they meant.

And… I was right.

Yeah…

Just so this doesn’t confuse people, I lost this job on Oct 27th due to some bullshit excuses that really equate to there being not enough work to have hired me in the first place.

Phone conversation went like this:

Cust: Can you do any better on the 100lb price?

Est: I’m not sure, I would have to check with my supervisor.

Cust: Well, what about dropping the stock to 80lb? Would that give me a significant price drop?

Est: I would have to re-do the quote to see what the price would come out to.  I can do that while waiting for an answer from my supervisor regarding the 100lb.

Cust: Thanks!

E-mail correspondence went like this:

Est: Here is your revised quote for the 80lb stock as requested.  Unfortunately I was unable to lower the cost on the 100lb quote.

Cust: Why are you sending me 80lb? I can’t use 80lb! I need 100lb!

WTF?! Do you not remember what you said on the phone not even 2 hours before?

*headdesk*