Yesterday, the black ink cartridge went out in Eagle’s printer and today I returned with a replacement. In the mean time, the department’s need of partials would not be stopped and the staff came up with a fix by printing out their normal forms rendered in pure red, blue, and green in an attempt to shift to the color cartridge. While creative, there are two problems:
1) Color ink is stupidly expensive
2) Ink is generally CYMK because it’s subtractive rather than RGB which is additive
I’d never seen a direct organizational chart of my firm. I knew it was somewhat flat in that there are more layers between a CIT and a Camp Director than between mail room person and president at work but I didn’t quite know its extent. I’d asked for one offhand before and always received a shoulder shrug as to where one could be found and some people claim that one didn’t exist.
Today in a bit of deus ex I got my answer: Someone asked me to print it out. It is a somewhat wide organizational chart in that it’s 136 inches wide and 15 inches tall (9:1) with each person listed in about 12 point font.  I think we should get it rendered in chenille and print up a couple to use as doormats. That way as people shuffle in staring at their feet they’ll learn something.
One of my work tasks is printing out large format objects on the 41″ printer. Someone send me a 3′ x 4′ poster, and I printed it. After printing the document I found several typographic errors and reprinted it again after checking with the requester. After the 2nd copy, the requester came to me and had a revision, all the references to the competing company on the poster needed add “(R)” after the name. So, I checked that all references had “(R)” after it and reprinted it. I was then told I needed to print another one and received an attached email saying “Sir, you need to replace all instances of (R) with (R) to avoid legal consequences.” That’s downright Kafka-esque and I double checked the annotated PDF which had circled the (R) with the note “replace with (R)”. At this point we were sufficiently confused and talked to the legal person.
Me: What does this change mean?
Him: You need to replace your “registered” abbreviation with our “registered” abbreviation.
Me: What’s that mean?
Him: You used parens, R, parens, you need to use what we wrote.
Me: But you wrote, parens, R, parens.
Him: No, that means the circle thing with the R in it. It’s a common abbreviation.
Apparently when we use (R) it means (R) when he uses (R) it means ®. How foolish of me not to know.
I was tired, it was late and I wanted to read something during my end of the day constitutional so as I printed out the Technology Monitor from the Economist my adrenal glands kicked in when I heard the 60″ plotter fire up and begin spitting out beautifully rendered text wide enough to fold an origami canoe. I ripped the 5′ x 2.75′ printout from the plotter holding 21 pages of text and made an impromptu scroll from two film rolling cores (toilet paper rolls on steroids) and I went off to the can.
Once I mastered the mechanics of rolling and unrolling the cores and my arms got tired of holding my techscroll I realized why very few members of the rabbinate do Torahnic criticism on the can, or why those who do probably have massive forearms and triceps.