Friday, November 24, 2006

3000 Glasses of beer on the wall

Steve's sister again, deciding to give it up with an update. Steve's at Barrymore's tonight, not celebrating Beau's win of Best Local Brew in the Ottawa XPress. We'll get you next year!!!

I earned my beer stripes a few weekends ago, when an undesirable beer task came up. Beau's had 3000 fabutastic pint glasses made up a while ago, which were deemed less fab and tastic after we noticed (okay, apparently Phil noticed) that on every couple of glasses, the S... just... faded away. The ink must have run out in the roller. At least, that's how I'm picturing the process, they make glasses using a web press, right? So we debated a bit on the whole "craft" concept, where individuality is good thing and if the glasses were unique that was okay... but in the end, they just looked like we didn't care. And the thing is, we do. Reaally. Care.

So, we pulled a few more out, and about every 3rd or 4th was messed up. Bummer. So we put a call in to the folks who arranged the glasses for us, and they said that they would in turn contact the co. who manufactured. And the mfg. co said that there was no possible way that many were messed up. If we wanted a credit, we would have to inspect the glasses and give them an accurate # of how many were ACTUALLy misprinted.

What's that? You need someone to correct errors and bring justice and order? Enter Jen! Professional editor! I find mistakes for a living! And so I spent a dusty, icky, paper-cutty, glass-cutty (I think I broke 3), lonely weekend inspecting 3000 glasses. Open a box, pull them out, sort them out, return to box, stack boxes, lather, rinse, repeat. I dreamed in glasses that night.

But as it turned out, the error rate was even higher than we suspected. So the moral of the story is, if somene says you screwed something up, admit it quickly, so they don't find the rest of your mistakes too.

FYI, I'm still waiting for my agreed-upon $50 for the job. (2 1/2 times less than my hourly professional rate.) But that's better than what I get paid for maintaining the blog. Maybe that's why it's been 2 months since the last update. Cheers!

Steve's sister :)