Gino
06-05-2007, 07:24 PM
Had a kinda repeat customer come into the shop last week. Let me say that he is a very limited ‘Ar-teest’ and maybe had three jobs in the last five years go through our shop.
Anyway, he asked me how to get vinyl letters from the backing paper onto the wood. I thought this was odd, since everything I ever gave him was cut, weeded and taped up and ready for his application with center marks and crosshairs. As the conversation bounced all around the methods and materials of making signs, it only took this ol’ fart about 2 minutes to figure out what was going on. I didn’t notice at first, but he was taking notes, writing down magazine names and catalog numbers and just about everything in site in our showroom. Well, then he asked me how much our printer costand the model numbers, where we got it, what software would I recommend and so on….. so I told him everything. I opened up to him and told him how good ‘Avery’ is. Told him about the Gerber 4b and told him of the many thousands of dollars his investor will be spending to get him up and rolling. In fact I showed him how many steps were involved in getting a simple line of copy ready to go from the software program…. into the ripping program, then into print setup and back over to the equilibrium housing station and then into the secondary rip spooler. After that it had to go back through the scanner and make sure all nodes had been edited properly and then formatted from raster to vector and back into some proprietary format that the printer or plotter understood. I showed him that there were literally 40 or 50 formats that he could choose, but only years of experience would offer him a solution. After setting my cutter to 25% cutting speed and explaining that 11 inches a minute is fast and that a complete 4’ x 8’ could take nearly a day to cut…. he couldn’t thank me enough for all of my help. See, I’m not only a S**T head here, I do it in everyday life too. That’s something that comes naturally with age….. and beer.
Funny part is, he came back the next afternoon and asked me for a job, because he said his investor wasn’t going to sink that kind of money into a business that is so hard to make money at doing. Then I found out his ‘Investor’ is a HousePainter and wants to do something easy as he gets older. I told him to open a ‘StarBucks’ or a tanning salon.
Was I helpful ??
How would you have treated someone like this ??
Gino
Anyway, he asked me how to get vinyl letters from the backing paper onto the wood. I thought this was odd, since everything I ever gave him was cut, weeded and taped up and ready for his application with center marks and crosshairs. As the conversation bounced all around the methods and materials of making signs, it only took this ol’ fart about 2 minutes to figure out what was going on. I didn’t notice at first, but he was taking notes, writing down magazine names and catalog numbers and just about everything in site in our showroom. Well, then he asked me how much our printer costand the model numbers, where we got it, what software would I recommend and so on….. so I told him everything. I opened up to him and told him how good ‘Avery’ is. Told him about the Gerber 4b and told him of the many thousands of dollars his investor will be spending to get him up and rolling. In fact I showed him how many steps were involved in getting a simple line of copy ready to go from the software program…. into the ripping program, then into print setup and back over to the equilibrium housing station and then into the secondary rip spooler. After that it had to go back through the scanner and make sure all nodes had been edited properly and then formatted from raster to vector and back into some proprietary format that the printer or plotter understood. I showed him that there were literally 40 or 50 formats that he could choose, but only years of experience would offer him a solution. After setting my cutter to 25% cutting speed and explaining that 11 inches a minute is fast and that a complete 4’ x 8’ could take nearly a day to cut…. he couldn’t thank me enough for all of my help. See, I’m not only a S**T head here, I do it in everyday life too. That’s something that comes naturally with age….. and beer.
Funny part is, he came back the next afternoon and asked me for a job, because he said his investor wasn’t going to sink that kind of money into a business that is so hard to make money at doing. Then I found out his ‘Investor’ is a HousePainter and wants to do something easy as he gets older. I told him to open a ‘StarBucks’ or a tanning salon.
Was I helpful ??
How would you have treated someone like this ??
Gino