« Idiots'Books Begins | Main | Getting the Word Out »
November 01, 2006
The Art Fit
We were really feeling good about ourselves. Facial Features of French Explorers was well into production. Pages were flying off the printer and I was turning them into books. When approximately 50 of them were complete, we got a worrisome message from our printer. On the electronic readout panel, in capital letters, in unambigous terms, we were informed that our "maintenance kit" would run out in 57 pages. The "maintenance kit," I soon learned, is a tightly packed roll of paper/fabric substrate mounted on a rod deep in the bowels of the printer. It's role, as far as I can determine, is to clean off the printing heads as a document prints so that ink smears do not occur. An admirable function, to be sure. But the Xerox Phaser is programmed to allow only 10,000 sheets to be printed on each "maintenance kit," before the printer gets upppity and refuses to print until said kit is replaced.
Here it is. Notice the dinginess:
Chestertown is a humble village, quiet and peaceful, virtuous and quaint. Which is another way of saying that Xerox Phaser maintenance kits are not readily available. We immediately placed an online order, but were forced to halt production entirely until it arrived. Our mailing timeline was revised, much to my consternation, and we bided our time. On the day of projected maintenance kit arrival there were shenanigans involving UPS and their refusal to accept the barn as our residence. They have known it for so long as Seiko's pottery that the notion that the upper level now houses Idiots'Books is taking some getting used to.
Anyway, I called UPS, issued some harsh words, and the kit arrived.
We joyfully resumed printing:
And I joyfully resumed production. I got on a roll, the several days of rest energizing me for the long slog ahead. I folded, trimmed, and stapled throughout the day, and soon I had a pille of 100 new books. Robbi came over to inspect my work. She frowned.
What she said was something like, "Hey Knucklehead," but I don't remember the exact words because once she pointed out the source of her consternation, my heart was flooded with despair.
Which quickly turned to anger.
And then fury.
Things got no better for the next few minutes.
When I was done with my fit, Iggy seized the opportunity to finish the job I had started.
And then all was quiet.
And now I have delved deep into the realms of self-indulgent drama without even telling you what got me so upset. And such is the nature of the "art fit," a genre of behavior marked by wild overraction and disconsolate gloom. I came in frequent contact with the "art fit" in my former life in marketing communications, so I have first-hand knowledge of how it is to be done.
Anyway, the problem was this. All 100 of the books I had just produced had evident smears on about half of the pages, a product of some printing anomaly that was creating a ghosted image of the text block from the left hand side of the page over the clean white space below the illustration on the other.
Just thinking about it still makes me mad.
Ironically, the problem started when we replaced the maintenance kit, which was supposed to prevent such things from happening. We tried to figure out how to fix the problem. We failed. We despaired. We called Xerox. They told us about a function, hitherto unknown to us, that alerts the printer when one is printing on the opposite side of an already printed sheet. The problem was occuring upon a page's second trip through the printer. We tried it. The problem was fixed. Which was great. We were joyful. Until I realized that I still had 175 books to produce.
I got back to it, lesson learned.
Posted by bogenamp at November 1, 2006 12:30 PM