Long time no post. A few might be excited to hear from me, most probably not.  I'm on the move again and am currently seeking a replacement for my job. While I haven't worked in prepress for almost two years, my current job requires skills for creating print material that's...fit to print. I've run some local help wanted ads detailing the job duties and here's what I've seen over the past few weeks. (This was advertised in Santa Fe, New Mexico if that has any bearing on anything).

"Please reply with a bit about yourself, why you would be a good fit for this company, and submit a resume in PDF format."
95% of replies ignored this, replied to the ad with no information whatsoever - not even a brief introduction, and attached a Word file. (this is for a design position)

I did glance at a few Word resumes (cringe) and they were awful. Typos, weird grammar, Calibri font (no Papyrus yet, I'm sure it's coming), "years of design & printing experience" that aren't reflected in the work history. (this is for a design position)

"Must be able to work on-site 4-5 days per week."
I got a few replies from people in other US states and even other countries. If we were open to telecommuting the ad would state so.

"Can you reveal the name of your company before I submit my resume?"
It's in the ad.

I interviewed a really good candidate who accepted an invitation for a second interview, then didn't show up. A simple "no thanks" is fine and creates no hard feelings down the road. (Because we're all connected at one point or another, especially in a small town)

Overall, I'm surprised at the low amount of genuine replies. You know, with a 'recession' and all, and a saturation of "designers" in the market. Out of 20 or so replies, only two took the time to sound genuinely interested in the job. As in they actually read the ad, responded with a coherent letter of interest, and attached a PDF plus samples of their work.

Have any of you been dealing with lame hiring situations? What do you red flag and what not? What kind of skills tests are you giving to applicants to be sure they can do what they say?

  (Marble IPA tonight)

I know of a good pressman who's looking for work and wanted to pass on some general marketplace info to him.

Do you know how much your press operators make? Well, how much then?

What type of presses do they run?

How long have they been in the business?

What city are you in?

Do you know any press operators who lost their job and found work in printing elsewhere? Describe.

If you're a manager, what would make you hire or not hire a press operator?

Thanks.

I have an older iMac running 10.5.8 and have been running FF 16.0.2 on it for the past couple years, no issues. From what I've read, that's the highest FF this OS supports so shut up Joe!

Went out of town last weekend, shut down the Mac, and upon restarting I saw that FF was displaying text in a bold font...body text, links, etc. It was like this on all sites I viewed, and then suddenly FF would crash every time I clicked a link leading to another site. Crash, crash, crash. I assumed it was a mysterious font issue, so I trashed Prefs and restarted. More crashing. Fonts used in Prefs are the same as always...Helvetica & Times system fonts. Finally I ended up deleting the FF app and the library profile folder and reinstalled a fresh version of 16.0.2. Still crashing every time I click a link and a new tab opens.

Any ideas?

As most of you know, I've been working for a small shop where conditions were so poor the entire staff walked out three weeks ago. This is a union shop and we (the employees) are currently in talks with the union to try to work out an agreement but the business owner has so far refused numerous requests for a meeting and has locked us out of the building. While the other employees want to fight their way back into their jobs, I really think my days in printing are over. I started updating my resume and even had an interview last week with a screen printer. I was given a 1 hour skill test – guess what it was? Make a vector out of a shitty JPG. I sat there squirming for an hour, thinking "Why the FUCK do I want to do this again?". There's an ad on my craigslist for a graphic designer and the background check includes "SSN/SIN validation, education verification, employment verification, criminal check, search against global sanctions and government watch lists, fingerprint verification, credit check, and/or drug test" WTF? Go through all that shit so I can sit in front of a computer all day fooling around with crappy JPGs and designing things that go straight into the trash? The salaries are getting lower and lower to the point of no longer being valued as a skilled trade (which it is) and the level of stress & sheer boredom just isn't worth it. I've really put a lot of thought into this and I think I'm saying goodbye, prepress.

I'm still on the low side of 40 and I want to get into some other skilled trade, one that is more recession-proof and might allow me to one day be self-employed. Some things that interest me are locksmithing, woodworking (like cabinet & furniture making), welding, electrical work, tile work, or pretty much any trade that doesn't require heavy labor or lifting. I'm a 125# female so I'm not going to pretend I can get a job at a construction site pushing wheelbarrows of bricks or running a jackhammer. Most of you know I'm really into vegetable gardening, but I just don't see much profit in doing farm work and I probably won't learn anything I don't already know. Go work on someone's farm all day, then come home and tend to my own garden? Seems dumb.

Planning on responding to some classified ads, enlisting with staffing agencies for temp work, checking out the state workforce services, and even contacting companies that interest me offering myself as a minimum wage slave in return for training. Might look into classes at the vocational college.

What kind of work would you guys do if you just dumped prepress today? What types of trades do you feel are recession proof and will always be in need? Do you think I'll encounter obstacles due to my age or gender?

It's that time again...

What methods and resources do you guys use to find work? What has worked and what hasn't? How have you spread word that you're available and looking? I'm pretty well-versed in this department but am open to new ideas.

First person to say the "f" word gets a punchy icon.    At most I might consider LinkedIn if others feel it's been a useful tool for them.

Obviously the smart thing to do is to not look for work in printing at all, but I'm going to give it one more shot and see what's out there.

What are you guys using on Windows?

I just spent 2 hrs screwing with an older (free) version of FontXplorer and couldn't get it to launch. Screw it. I downloaded the latest version and am going to demo it for 30 days, it's $89 to buy. Looks like Suitcase is only 10 bucks more. Which one sucks the least?

Are you or have been in one? How many employees? Did the union make any difference in the work environment? What was the money used for other than Mafia investments?

Comments, please.

Wanted to start a general thread for OO and I have a spreadsheet question to start things off.

I'm doing a numbering job on the copier, I mean digital press, via CWS and am using their VDP function to create a master. For the #ing I'm using Indy's Data Merge and I thought I was ready to go until I realized this is running on 2-part NCR.

Does anyone know how to make a consecutive # list in Calc so it looks like this?

4001
4001
4002
4002

etc. for a total of 2000 records.  :kiss:

I need some tips on backing up XP & 7 to external USB drives. I have 4 workstations I want to clone on a weekly basis, not all of them are on the network. I tried cloning the Windows 7 box using SyncBack and it resulted in like 21,000 serious errors so that's not working. I hate Windows and am looking for the simplest method to do this, and for free. On the Macs I use Carbon Copy Cloner and it just works, a mirror image of a hard drive cloned onto an external drive...that's what I'm after for Windows.

Has anyone here found a linen/laid cover stock that prints good quality on a color copier? I tried some sample prints for a customer and the result is always spotty due to the unsmooth finish. Our paper vendor said there are digital textured stocks available and I'm getting some samples this week to try. I often have similar results with large solid areas of color on some uncoated cover stocks (Cougar).

We might be getting one. Bossman got an offer he can't refuse.

Anyone have one? Complaints, other than it's a copier? The one we're looking at will be at least 20 feet long with all the finishing blocks on it.

How often do you calibrate your "digital presses"? Do you find a daily calibration provides more reliable color matches, in general?

Do you calibrate to a certain stock before running a color critical job?

Do you never calibrate at all?

explain...

Do you use any 3rd party addons for the Mac OS? Which ones and why? Are there any you have found you couldn't live without? (in prepress or personally)

I'm running 10.5.8. Any recommended linkies of sites with the most popular/highest rated addons?

Has anyone done this? I'm in a situation right now where two different shops want to share me (because I'm totally awesome).

Both employers are ok with it, diff print markets/customer base so no competition issues. I'll get my 40-ish hours and a wider range of experience & type of work.

Yay or nay? I see it as a good fallback in case one doesn't work out.

Looking for recommendations/suggestions on a job ticketing system for a small shop. We do mostly wide format & screen printing along with sheetfed offset.

For those of you who do or have worked in a smaller shop what have you used? Is there an online software that worked for you? Something like PrintSmith is just way overkill for our level of business. I think invoicing is done with Quickbooks if that means anything.

Thx!

We have a USB external drive connected to our RIP for backup. SyncBack threw out an alert a few days ago that the drive couldn't be found. It gets power and I can hear the disk spinning, but suddenly it won't mount on Win or Mac. No weird clicking, it sounds normal.

Is it trash or what?

We had someone come in our front door with 40 yr old building plans on microfiche that he wanted printed out. Has anyone dealt with this before and does it involve a neg scanner? (we don't have one). We referred him to a repro place in town that does maps and stuff.

I've gotten word that we need to add another workstation to prepress (small dept with 2 operators). We're Mac based and all job files for the past decade or so are primarily Mac Adobe. Right now we're running CS4 on an adequate iMac and we have a crappy old Windows box used only for PDF'ing Word docs and such. The new system needs to play nice with the current Mac so 2 operators can pull files from a server or work on stuff on either machine and not have any major issues. We currently have another seat of CS3 that isn't being used (it was installed on another Mac we got rid of) so I presume that could be installed on a new Mac and possibly upgraded to CS5.

With this setup are we forced into getting another Mac or can this work with Windows? If we got a Windows box and wanted to upgrade the Mac CS3 seat to CS5 is Adobe gracious enough to allow an upgrade from Mac to Win?

Any recommendations on what type of system to get for low-end prepress? (specs, hardware, etc)

Also, should we buy RAM from Apple? Just wondering.

I'm doing some research on subscribing to a stock photo/vector service. Primarily we will be needing vector artwork rather than stock photos. I'm already aware of a lot of the *free* sites out there, but we want to go legit and have a huge selection of art to choose from that can be downloaded instantly upon purchase.

What services do you use and what do you like or hate about them? Is paying a monthly fee more worth it than paying per image?

I installed CS5 yesterday. It changed all my InDesign CS4 file icons to the CS5 icon and in the Get Info window it's set to launch CS5. I tried changing the default opening app to CS4 but it doesn't stick. I got a note from my compadre that "InDesign will save as CS5 by default" but I don't think that's possible if you're in CS4...he probably had CS5 running and didn't realize it.

Did I make a mistake by installing this?

(p.s. Thanks Skryber, it "worked")