New Toys at Work!
We’re getting a new printer installed, and we’ve been training all day. There have been long speeches about colour matching, pantone tweaking, paper weights, grain direction… it’s been very, very technical. But it’s a brand new machine - hot off the floor, if you will (and glitchy, as service can attest to - poor guy’s gonna be here all afternoon I’d bet!) and that fact alone thrills me.
I spend a lot of time around computers, and I am very comfortable with them - I can type without looking and I love the convenience of learning innumerable keyboard shortcuts for every program I use regularly - but I long ago threw plans to work on the cutting edge of technology out the window. However, working here, about once every three months some element of “the new shit” lands in our lap and we get to play with it for a few days before it becomes absorbed into the panic and tedium of workflows and deadlines. Those three days are so much better than anything else I do at work. Learning about new laser print technology, reminding myself of the enormous field of abstract thought that is colour spaces, navigating RIP software development gossip… it’s all legitimately interesting to me. Surprisingly interesting. Sometimes… frighteningly interesting.
There’s an element of play when interacting with a new piece of technology - or at least, that’s how I approach them. I realize that many people have trouble doing that, and focus immediately on end results (productivity) - often to their frustration. But that brief moment I allow myself of pushing all the buttons, opening all the menus, and tweaking all the setting, is one of the highlights of my job here. And I rarely speak of highlights, eh? But this is it. I love new toys, especially big, powerful beasts that can print 70 pages a minute, full colour, any paper weight, on linens and transparencies, and slip in inserts at the end without blinking (jamming). It’s the kind of machine that makes me want to design a really, really beautifully complex book just to try everything it can do, at least once.
But the tragedy at work is that there’s no time for that, silly! We have a brief period of training and then we start using it. Hard. And quickly the challenging jobs become frustrating instead of fun, because we can’t play anymore - all we can do is jerry-rig it so we can at least meet our deadlines.
That said, my old boss just returned to us today, and honestly, the whole mood lightened. Guys, there is hope. There is fate. There is a god. And that god loves me, almost as much as that god loves Carolyn. And maybe - maybe there will be time to play with our new toy. Maybe it won’t be the bane of our existence that the last toys were. Maybe it’ll be a white Christmas!
…aaaaand out!
I spend a lot of time around computers, and I am very comfortable with them - I can type without looking and I love the convenience of learning innumerable keyboard shortcuts for every program I use regularly - but I long ago threw plans to work on the cutting edge of technology out the window. However, working here, about once every three months some element of “the new shit” lands in our lap and we get to play with it for a few days before it becomes absorbed into the panic and tedium of workflows and deadlines. Those three days are so much better than anything else I do at work. Learning about new laser print technology, reminding myself of the enormous field of abstract thought that is colour spaces, navigating RIP software development gossip… it’s all legitimately interesting to me. Surprisingly interesting. Sometimes… frighteningly interesting.
There’s an element of play when interacting with a new piece of technology - or at least, that’s how I approach them. I realize that many people have trouble doing that, and focus immediately on end results (productivity) - often to their frustration. But that brief moment I allow myself of pushing all the buttons, opening all the menus, and tweaking all the setting, is one of the highlights of my job here. And I rarely speak of highlights, eh? But this is it. I love new toys, especially big, powerful beasts that can print 70 pages a minute, full colour, any paper weight, on linens and transparencies, and slip in inserts at the end without blinking (jamming). It’s the kind of machine that makes me want to design a really, really beautifully complex book just to try everything it can do, at least once.
But the tragedy at work is that there’s no time for that, silly! We have a brief period of training and then we start using it. Hard. And quickly the challenging jobs become frustrating instead of fun, because we can’t play anymore - all we can do is jerry-rig it so we can at least meet our deadlines.
That said, my old boss just returned to us today, and honestly, the whole mood lightened. Guys, there is hope. There is fate. There is a god. And that god loves me, almost as much as that god loves Carolyn. And maybe - maybe there will be time to play with our new toy. Maybe it won’t be the bane of our existence that the last toys were. Maybe it’ll be a white Christmas!
…aaaaand out!