T206 Reference / Reflections.....Tuesday Nite Trivia

[tedzan]

Steve B

When you worked in a Print shop, did you guys trash all mis-prints, errors, etc....or, take some with you ?

I had a part-time job in a Print shop during my High School days. Being the "pack-rat" that I am, I would
take home some of the printing rejects. At that age, I was really fascinated by the printing business.


TED Z
.

[steve B]

Originally Posted by tedzan

Steve B

When you worked in a Print shop, did you guys trash all mis-prints, errors, etc....or, take some with you ?

I had a part-time job in a Print shop during my High School days. Being the "pack-rat" that I am, I would
take home some of the printing rejects. At that age, I was really fascinated by the printing business.


TED Z
.

It was also my HS job, part time during school, and full time in the summer. The place cross trained us, and most of the full time guys were able to handle other jobs in the place. Some had started as sweepers.
I eventually worked a bit of time in every department except the front office. I also didn't get to run the paper cutter, but was around them every day.


The other guys as far as I know didn't take any misprints home. A lot of them got turned over and used as make-ready sheets. I took home a few finished things that may have been misprints or may have been just overruns. (Everyone starts printing something like 125 sheets if the order is for 100 ) but no misprints. If they were misprints, the problems were very minor. We were a fairly high quality low production shop. Many jobs were under 10,000 finished pieces.

None of the other guys were at all interested in problems. They knew what caused them, avoided it if possible, and didn't let the bad stuff get delivered.
There was that one time a couple of them made fake concert tickets and sold them to a scalper... I only knew because I found one of the plates when I grabbed it out of the scrap stack to use as a dustpan. But that wasn't defective stuff, just highly irregular.

They were very tolerant of me bringing in a messed up card a couple times and asking " How did this happen?" Although they did think it was weird that I collected cards with printing errors.

If we had printed any sort of cards, or something interesting like that as much of the scrap/plates etc as I could carry/ask for/sneak out would have come home with me.