Why I’m currently seeing red

Posted 10 June 2007, by Aaron

Right now, this very instance, I’m fuming! It’s probably a bad idea to come anywhere near my blog in this state of mind, but as it’s been six days since my last post I’ve decided to try out the therapeutic properties of good old fashioned ranting.

Regular readers will be aware that I’ve been very busy lately putting together my end of year exhibition which draws to a close two years of studying multimedia design.

Ten o’clock tomorrow morning is the absolute deadline for the show. Everything must be working and in place before all the students get kicked out and the lecturers assess how we’ve done. The show starts properly on Wednesday and opens to the public.

Now, I’m actually well aware how stressful event management can be (I do a fair bit of it in the day job), and I’m also a pretty well organised chap. Most of my printing was all in place well over a week ago, the interactive CV was up and running two weeks ago, everything was ordered allowing plenty of time for deliveries, and generally speaking, I was cruising.

Then, stupidity took hold.

The business card cock-up

This is no ordinary cock-up - it’s a double whammy. Firstly, my inexperience led me to supply dodgy artwork to the printers who were unsure where to trim the cards. Consequently they trimmed them in completely the wrong place.

Although I was quite angry with the printers, in hindsight I admit it was my fault. I decided to order some more, with better artwork. Great, until these came back and I realised that I had the wrong post code on them! (I’m allowed to ignore my own advice regarding the importance of proof reading.)

So I ordered a third set of cards. I’m confident these will be OK. Trimmed in the correct place and with the correct post code. Great, except that they haven’t arrived yet so I won’t have them for tomorrow morning!

The interactive CV CD-ROM cock-up

Yesterday, I spent a rather unenjoyable day looking out my window at the lovely summer weather outside, whilst burning CDs, printing CD labels, and sticking the labels onto the CD. It took me quite a while to do this but I was delighted when I finished because that was it, everything done.

This afternoon, I proudly popped one of the CDs into my girlfriend’s Mac so I could show her what I’d done. And it didn’t work. In fact none of the 40-odd CDs worked on the Mac. There was nothing massively wrong with the CDs, just one file not working properly. It’s called ‘index.html’ - don’t know if you’ve heard of it?

The file had actually been saved as ‘index.html.html’. Not completely sure how that happened, but it did. My PC obviously thought that it was such a minor thing that it didn’t matter. Therefore when I tested the CD it worked fine. Macs however, proved a little less forgiving.

Have I learnt anything?

Yes. The cost of mistakes. My wallet is weeping after three lots of business cards, and two lots of CDs and premium CD labels.

Has sharing the problem helped?

No. I feel just as wound up as when I began this post. In fact, the noise of my printer doing the CD labels is more annoying than it usually is. This isn’t helping. Maybe some sympathy will? Or maybe a pint of vodka?

Many thanks for the previous posts’ comments: Marc, Arpit, Sera, fidothedog, David, Tara, Justin, Johnnie, Gregory, Dan, borga and last but by no means least, Ace.

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Tags:Blogging, Design, Personal, Proof Reading, Stupidity