Monday, January 17, 2011

Dear Lord, these invitations are killing me

Some of you who are attending our wedding may have noticed that you have not actually received a formal invitation in the mail just yet.  Well, we are working on that, and we will get them out soon if we both don't die trying.  We decided to design and make them ourselves; it didn't seem like it would be too herculean a task.  Ursula does plenty of paper crafts and is very creative; we both know how to do layouts in Illustrator; it should be a piece of cake, right?  Unfortunately, there was another element that we failed to consider.  The people we would need to print our project for us.

So we have these invitations designed and ready to go.  Taking them to the printer should be easy, they print it on card stock and cut it to size, then we're out the door.  So we take our flash drive down to Office Max.  And then Darryl happens.  Fucking Darryl.  Our encounter started bad;  there was a woman behind the counter when we arrived helping someone else, and a guy who was on the phone.  After standing there for a minute the girl asks if we've been helped, and when we say "no" tells Darryl to get on it.  So he ends his phone call and comes over.  Darryl was a mess; he talked too fast, and had question after question.  But he didn't seem to really listen to our answers.  He didn't understand how our booklets were supposed to be laid out.  Dude, they're a card.  I'm sure you've seen them before.  A page on front, two inside, piece of cake.  But he didn't get it.  Finally we drew him a picture, which he decided to keep in with the order in case he forgot.  Around this time, Ursula had to walk away, but for some reason I stuck with it.  I don't know, I figured I could get through to him somehow.  So the next thing is he decides he can print it on larger paper, to get more on a sheet and save us some money.  Sure, sounds good.  Then he asks again about how the cards are going to be laid out.  Look at the picture, Darryl!  I don't know how long this went on.  I asked him how long it would take, and he would tell me prices.  Finally I got a manager to come over.  He says the order form looks right, and it should be 24 hours.  Then comes the kicker: Darryl asks if the other stores would have the larger paper size to print it on.  They don't actually have it in stock.  Now to be clear, I didn't ask him for the larger paper size; he suggested it.  And now I realize I should have walked away when Ursula did.

Anyway, we took our print job to another shop.  The guy seemed to know what he was doing, but his printer was broken.  He told us to make sure our images were pdfs, submit them online, and he would call us to let us know if they could be printed Friday.  Well, I submitted them, received an automated "your job was submitted" email, and never heard a thing.  They are closed all weekend (I'm not sure about Monday).

So long story short, you will see the invitations soon.  If this process doesn't kill the two of us.

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