October 19, 2010
DM Super Stars: The Guy On the Press
Every now and then, we like to pay tribute to some of the folks at EU who work in the background … people our customers may never see face to face, but whose work they know very well. Here’s one story I wanted to share.
For years, we printed a 16-page, saddle-stitched newsletter on a very tight turnaround. One Friday it went on the press, as scheduled. At 3 a.m., the phone in my bedroom rang. It was the pressman running the job, calling to tell me that he’d seen an error on page 14. “In the fifth paragraph, they’ve converted dollars to pounds sterling and they’ve done it wrong,” he said. “They’ve actually made their calculation from pounds to dollars backwards.”
“What? What?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing (not that the customer might have made an error – it happens – but that our press guy had caught a typo that wasn’t even a typo … in the middle of the night …. while the job was running. True, I’d seen these sorts of miraculous catches by our press folks before. But a monetary conversion? This was beyond the… well… beyond “the pound.”
“Are you sure?” I asked him. “I’m positive,” he said. “I know because I just got back from a trip to London and it’s fresh in my mind.”
“Okay,” I said. “Make the change and we’ll call the customer as soon as they get into the office.” The customer was delighted and amazed, as you can imagine. The newsletter was printed and mailed – on time – and correctly!
Dollars to pounds sterling and back to dollars again. All at 3 a.m. in very fast motion. Now that’s a hero to me.
