skippy the bush kangaroo

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

a very odd milestone...

on december 1, 1999, i showed up for my first night of work at a small and very young print shop. this wasn't my first foray into the printing business, but the company was the first that used offset litho machinery that i'd ever seen -- prior to that, all my printing experience was with flexo presses.

i had to start at entry level with offset printing. compared to flexography, it's complicated as hell. flexo printing is pretty easy to get the hang of. your ink usually has the consistency of chicken soup (and at the worst, ranch dressing), and all you need to print with it are two rubber anilox rollers, one plate cylinder, and one impression cylinder. the one thing that kept throwing me for a loop was the rubber plates we used -- they were mirror images of what we were supposed to print, like standard red-ink stamps. i've never quite gotten used to processing mirror images, in flexo or anywhere else. right-to-left just looks wrong to me.

and then i got into offset litho. the plates we use are left-to-right, and at first, that was the only thing that made sense about this type of printing to me. offset ink has the consistency of anywhere from used 10w30 motor oil to standard labrea tar pit fare, and you need oscillationg rollers, distributor rollers, rider rollers, a form roller, a chrome roller, a metering roller, a ductor roller, a plate cylinder, a blanket cylinder, and an impression cylinder just to thin that thick-assed bastard out so that you may properly print with it. i much prefer the simpler flexo method of printing.

and yet, i stuck with offset anyway. i won't say i've mastered the technology, even if i have and don't know it. all i'm saying is, as of today, i've been working at this offset printing company for ten years, and while i may not ever make it into whatever press operator hall of fame exists, i still made the ten-year mark. i've never done that anywhere in anything before in my life.

it's an odd achievement to me. but for some reason, i'm proud of it. i've quit blogging four times since early 2008, but i stayed with this print shop for ten years straight. go figure...

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posted by Jim Yeager at 6:19 AM |

6 Comments:

Good for you! It seems that most jobs like this are all going the way of dinosaurs, so having a job for more than three years is a milestone for sure.

I posted in the other printing thread here that my father ran a litho press for 35+ years. He retired with crappy benefits and is permanently deaf from the job, but he worked hard his whole life and I'm proud of him. The company was known for printing business forms and checks for GM, but they had to expand and convert to the computer age and my dad retired on the edge of the dying era.

Good luck with the job. You deserve a round of applause for sticking with it!
commented by Anonymous donnah, 7:33 AM PST  
Happy anniversary! Congrats on doing a good job. I loved it as a kid to go into the newspaper office and watch them being printed. Then got to deliver them with the papers still warm, it was great in the winter time, my hands in the paperbag, delivering 75 papers at 5 am. I have been fascinated with printing ever since.
commented by Anonymous Anonymous, 12:48 PM PST  
good work, men
commented by Blogger tomitron, 5:04 PM PST  
Looking for Green Printing? Shepson.com.au is using Offset Printing Sydney.We follow the philosophy of Environment Friendly Printing and eco friendly printing with excellent customer services.
commented by Blogger Daniel, 1:05 AM PST  
Bartkid sez,
Congrats on your 10 yrs.

Jan 2010 will be 10 yrs at my job for me.

(I was tired of the hassles of my old job. I was visiting my parents for Christmas, saw the posting, and, on a whim, applied. I went for an interview, and, before I was out of bed the next day, they phoned offering me the job. Later, I found out I was the last interview and the most qualified. By the way, the third week of January is not the best week to drive cross-continent in a U-Haul.)

No KC clip today, but here is a tangential Fripp aphorism:
We have three rights: the right to work, the right to pay to work, and the right to suffer the consequences of our work. We have three obligations: the obligation to work, the obligation to pay to work, and the obligation to suffer the consequences of our work.
commented by Anonymous Anonymous, 12:13 PM PST  
Congrats, my friend. I've only held one job for 10 or more years and in this day and age, it's a milestone. I'm still not sure whether you like it though. ;)
commented by Blogger Fixer, 2:55 PM PST  

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