Like a kick in the head

So I came in this morning, and started cleaning up some of the many proofs, printouts, and support materials left lying around from the monster brochure project last week. As I am stacking them up, my eye rests on the logo of an engineering firm who provided some drawings which I used as support graphics in the brochure. Then I glanced at one of the proofs, where their credit line is.

The name was wrong.

We normally print this project as two-color, black plus one spot color. However, a printer in town gave us a great price on 4-color process printing. It was such a great price, in fact, that we could afford to print 5000 extra copies as give-aways, over the 47,000 required for our normal distribution of this brochure.

Two color printing requires two sets of film, two “stripping” sessions, and two plates. Four color process requires 4 film negatives per side, 4 stripping sessions, and 4 plates. The additional $350-$400 of repairing my mistake is actually miniscule to the fact that we lose at minimum ONE DAY of time on the press, for a job that is to go to our distribution channel at noon this Friday.

Instead of HNTB Engineering, I spelled “HTMB”.

I already expect to pay for the extra charges out of pocket. I feel God’s grace and mercy in the fact that the project was just being mounted on the press to be run when my print rep ran in and yelled “stop the presses”. And $400 over the next few months is significant, but not unachievable. However, I respect the fact that when my boss gets out of a meeting he’s been in all morning, it would not be unheard of to can me for such a mistake.

My sister works for HTMB, and as her situation was at the top of my mind when I made my final proofs, it looked correct to my mind’s eye.

Knowing the cause of the error doesn’t excuse the error.

Needless to say, until I go in and tell my boss, I will be unproductive and a nervous twitch at best. I have already worked through the immediate frustration, anger, and resolution. Now I have to do this again with my boss.

I found a co-worker in an unrelated department. I confessed. Her amusement helped me to have a better perspective of the whole thing. And, after all, a job is a job is a job. I still feel like I’ve been kicked in the head.