At what price absolution?

At the end of a very stressful roller-coaster sort of week, I find myself in the position of being beholden to The Prince of Darkness, the guy who decided from the moment I walked through the door of my current employer’s establishment that he didn’t like me and never changed his opinion. And that’s a very strange and disturbing position indeed.

This began when I made a huge mistake on a print job. I know that this is not the end of the world. I’m not in the kind of profession where mistakes mean someone lives or dies. I don’t tinker with human innards or bottle prescription medications; I don’t secure payloads to space shuttle bays or assemble a product that might blow someone to tiny little bits if not created just right. I do graphic design. And short of typos that might get your company sued, the biggest mistake I could possibly make would only result in losing money for my employer and/or being shown the door.

Some mistakes are just more costly than others. And I’ve come a long way from perfectionism to admitting to myself that it’s OK to be human.

Sometimes I forget about that. And re the consequences of this one, the dust has not quite settled.

To make a very long and complicated story somewhat shorter, through my inattention, I created approximately 60 pages of a catalog (the back half of a lovely guidebook that sings the praises of living and doing business in the Hudson Valley) using not a US standard 8 ½ x 11 page but an A4 European size. This was because the plug-in program I used to spill the membership database into uniformly and neatly designed pages of catalog listings came from the UK; the documentation was incomprehensible so the nice tech guy not only walked me through the process but created a template for my use: An A4 template. And I merrily went my way paginating the data, proofing the pages, passing on the section to be proofed by the client; doing the changes the client gave back, etc., all on an A4 page size.

Then we went to press.

The printer discovered the error and reported the information to my boss, who pulled me into her office at about 3:45 on Wednesday to deliver the news.

I apologized profusely and said I would fix the error, then hunkered down to change the page margins, re-flow the text, fix the line breaks that resulted from moving all the text…and knew by about 4:45 that there was no way in hell I could get all 60 pages done in time for her to leave that day with the updated files on CD like she wanted, so she could drop it off at the printer in the morning. I know this doesn’t ameliorate the problem, but she often has unrealistic expectations of how long it takes to get certain things done.

Anyhow, I was already punchy, at that point of diminishing returns, and even if I stayed that night, I wouldn’t get done until 7:30 or 8, probably making a lot of errors in the process, so I didn’t offer to stay. I did offer to come in early the next morning when I was fresher, finish it up and then send it by courier in the morning. I knew the printer; I’d worked with the owner personally for fifteen years, eight at my last job where I was the print buyer and swung a ton of work (and money) his way, and knew the couple of hours between when she’d drop it off and when he’d get it by courier wouldn’t amount to the proverbial hill of beans. But this didn’t wash with her.

“The courier will cost fifty dollars,” she snapped. “And the client won’t approve it.”

I said I would pay for the courier, since this was my responsibility. Or I would drive it down to the printer myself.

She merely walked away.

And then I drove home, certain I would be fired. I barely slept that night, even with Husband telling me to put it in perspective, that everyone makes mistakes, etc. I still thought I had to have that damned cape at the ready.

But somehow I managed to strap on my confidence and go into work early, determined to fix what I’d screwed up. And discovered pretty soon that in making the changes, we would gain four pages and the client hadn’t approved that expense, either.

Reluctantly, I reported this news to my boss.

“I can’t justify that to the client,” she said, and these were the last words she said to me all day.

Enter the Prince of Darkness. Who came up with the brilliant idea (and it was seriously brilliant, and I told him so) to make the type a half-point smaller. I ran a ten-page test, showed him how much we would save, then I did this for the whole of the document.

Not only did we get back to our original approved page count, but we also lost two pages.
Princey couldn’t have looked more pleased with himself than if he’d discovered a cure for cancer. I have no illusions that he did this solely to save my ass. He did it mostly to look good to the boss and partially to save the company’s face.

But even though we now had a solution, my boss still refused to speak with me. Anything she had to communicate to me she delivered through him. And the news was that we’d lost a day on press and ran the possibility of losing the client. In addition, she was taking both him and our other designer off the work they’d planned to do that afternoon to proofread all 60-some corrected pages, item by item, against the last proof the client had approved.

I felt like I was in boot camp, and the entire platoon was made to scrub the latrine floor with their toothbrushes because I screwed up during maneuvers.

After a long day of powering through the changes, waiting, and being given the silent treatment, I burned the CD at 6:00 that evening and P of D ran it over to FedEx.

Then I went home and collapsed.

I don’t know when I walk in on Monday (with a box of pastries for my platoon) if I’ll still have a job. But at least I know that I owned up to the error and did everything in my physical power to correct it.

At least I’ll have that.

And if I still have a job, I’ll owe it to the Prince. Just wonder how long I’ll have to kiss his ass to make up for him saving mine.