[5330] in APO Printshop
Print Run Successful
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Person)
Sun Jan 13 18:37:29 2008
Cc: Michael Person <mjperson@mit.edu>
From: Michael Person <mjperson@MIT.EDU>
Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2008 18:37:02 -0500
To: apo-printshop@mit.edu
Hi folks,
Kate and I successfully concluded our print run today.
Thank you very much to those who assisted with our office access.
I'll include a few questions that came up during our run,
followed by a story. Feel free to skip either...
Thanks again,
Mike Person
---------------
Questions:
1) Inspection revealed that the use of rubber bands to hold blocks
of type together has been deprecated in favor of tying them together
with string. However, we could find no source of string or runner bands
anywhere in the shop. Did we just miss it?
2) When laying out pins we noticed that there didn't seem to be a
T square or protractor anymore, just the usual rulers. Did these
things get moved, or are they just gone?
3) Kate and I were both convinced that the first step in cleaning the
roller/platten was to apply "Easy Street". We also remember something
called "goop" which may or may not have been the same thing. The
phrase "roller conditioner" also came to mind. But in searching
around,
we found none of this stuff, and ended up cleaning everything with
blanket wash. Are those other substances no longer used, or did we
just not find anything?
------------------
Story:
It came to pass that we eventually ran out of the letter "e"
in our chosen font. (I blame the Vegetable penne entree.) After
searching
through the whole case, we started poking through the undistributed
blocks of type looking for something in our font. Sadly, there was
very little in our font anywhere.
As we searched, we came across a large mound (not block, definitely
a mound) of completely splayed (is that the right word) type. We fished
through it a little hoping to find our font. Buried down near the
bottom
of the mound was a little card. The card listed four fonts and sizes,
the date 02/98, and the initials "MJP and KM". The horror!
As most of you can imagine, it's very difficult to get anything
done when you are drowning in guilt. So, while Kate reset our
invitation
in a different font with more "e", I started laboriously separating
the four
fonts and sizes into piles for distribution.
Then, once done, we switched jobs, and I worked on locking up our
new block, while Kate started distributing the sorted mound. After a few
minutes of confusion, she announced that none of my freshly sorted fonts
were in fact the fonts listed on the little card with our initials.
Searching around some more, we found ANOTHER little card, with
four fonts listed, and a different date in 1998, with a different
pair of
initials. (Withheld to preserve the dignity of the guilty.) Hooray!
We were not responsible for that decade old tragedy. Kate finished
distributing the mound of type into the proper case, and all was well.
But then, if our card didn't go with the pile of type, what
did it go with? Searching the trays again, we found another block
(intact) for an event in 1998 that we did indeed print. Sigh, it
seems we were guilty after all. So, then we went through and
distributed that block into four different font cases as well.
By now, we were pretty sick of distributing type, but not going
to let such a thing happen again, so we went around distributing
everything
we set as soon as we printed it. Hopefully, nothing will happen to the
finished invitations before they can be mailed...
Searching through all of the trays, we are now quite certain that
no type block anywhere in the shop can be attributed to our past.
However, I'm still feeling a bit guilty, and a surprising number
of set type blocks bear dates before 2002, so I'm likely to try and get
into the office to distribute type during my lunch hours (I still work
on campus) once my ID card is programmed into the office door for easy
access. If some enterprising current press-op would like to make a
little
sign prioritizing which blocks I should work on in which order, I'd be
happy to do a little penance.
