dimly recalling work

In 1990, days before I graduated community college with an AA in Commercial Art, a counselor told me there was a company interested in me (for which I should have thanked the counselor, in hindsight), so I went over and interviewed and was hired before I was even out on the street. For the next fifteen (or sixteen) years, I had an almost scary sort of job security in a relatively family-like environment of co-workers and bosses I saw every day. I worked for a garden center, but not in it-- the corporate office was on the other side of the parking lot, and the garden center (the flagship center of a small chain, in Hampton, Virginia) was handy but not compulsory.

I was to learn QuarkXPress and Illustrator (no Photoshop yet, but a couple of years of diligent scrounging netted a limited version of it that came with a scanner, and it had an upgrade path I was eventually able to persuade them to fund) and turn out ads and literature for these three (or so, over the years) stores, as well as all the signage. I thought about a classmate at my school who was really a good artist, but in a sort of death slump resulting from our teacher's "lose a letter grade for every day late" policy, and I thought about how much work it looked like and then I actually opened my mouth and said "This is really a job for two. There's a guy at the school you could probably hire for the signs," and darn if I didn't end up working next to him for most of a decade, before his obvious abilities got him recruited away for more money at one of the newspapers we dealt with.

My boss often said that the owner of the company was a visionary, and he seemed to be. I later came to believe she was the visionary, and he was smart enough to go along with most of her ideas. Bit by bit, she got us the hardware and software and supplies to keep the customer's attention on our products. And we delivered! The newspaper ads I made for them are painful to look upon now, but we generated business. The customer newsletter had a circulation around 35,000, and we had a return rate on our coupons that got double-takes from our media reps. The newsletter went from a monochrome trifold to a full-color tabloid, and I designed a web page that got us eyeballs (with strict procedures to keep the thing fresh each time someone went to look at it). I got to play with a lot of swell equipment, once the chief could see how much it brought back to us.

There were exciting times. I asked my boss to prioritize the numerous piles of paper on my desk, and she said "This one is first priority. So is this one. This one here is only second priority, but it has the earliest deadline so you'll have to do it first." We threw festivals that required dozens (and more every year) of vendors to set up booths, with publications for each. 

Though I wasn't the sign maker, I somehow spent enough time making signs to have learned a few things. We had metal shelves of equipment and supplies, and I loved having all the different colors of paper stock to choose from. Many of the signs went outside, displayed in sun and rain and waterings, and I learned the mysteries of laminating-- how one tiny flaw will suck water into a sign like a sponge, making it ugly and contorted. Lamination was one of our triumphs. We started out with a machine that could laminate letter-size paper in pre-cut plastic envelopes you ran through it. This led to such a demand that we expanded to a monster of a machine (with its own monstrous problems), and we could feed monster-size sheets through that, and agonize over whether a banner went in too crooked to make it.

I sometimes ended up running the thing for a while, and when I was at my peak, I'd hear the voices of the Three Easily Impressed Extras, exclaiming:

"See! He LAMINATES!"

"Aiieee! He laminates like a beast! A beast of LAMINATION!"

"(makes religious gesture) Never have these eyes of mine beheld such laminating!"

I learned things about handouts and how best to defend them against the inevitable moisture plants need-- we ended up with sheltered racks, and reformatted everything to 5.5" x 8.5", because larger things bend sooner.

I went to an expo with Pat (my boss and friend) and we admired a padding machine which cost a couple hundred dollars. "We can make one of these," I said. When I got back to the office, I drew a design and gave it to the handyman with an explanation, and he brought it back SLIGHTLY IMPROVED, even! It was some pieces of wood screwed together, and we made pads with it for years!

We learned about our worst enemy: The Sun. Red printing was a big thing for us, as nothing catches eyeballs like the *Judicious* use of an eye-catching color. The thing was, though, that red anything faded faster than black anything, or even blue. We could see it in our signs and banners. I could see it in the bumper sticker of a truck I used to see in the employee lot, in red and blue (on white), showing a flag and defiantly promising THESE COLORS WON'T RUN. Knowing what I knew about red, I smiled knowingly each time I looked at that lonely little field of stars that had been a US flag, and wondered if the makers of the sticker or its users would ever notice that they now said THESE COLORS    RUN!

I learned a lot about photocopying and color printing, too. It was particularly educational when black areas in printing were physically sliding right off the paper. (I used the information I got from that to reconstruct a gravestone photo in Massachusetts later on.)

I learned that I didn't care much for coffee, and cigarette smell got old as dirt even before I'd spent one year across the hall from the breakroom. The number of employees we had meant each of us cleaned the thing for a month, and now all coffee smells like grounds to me. We fought ants.

And now it's all over with, gone with the wind, its players scattered, and the red parts faded by the sun. The Hampton location-- the original, the main location-- no longer exists and is probably crappy self-storage warehouses by now, like everything else in the area was striving to become when I left. Last time I heard from someone there was some kind of LinkdIn scam which I ignored, from a name that was like the AI version of someone I'd worked with (though I got a nice reception once when I called to get some info-- Georgia was still answering the front phone).

Anyway, it was nice to remember all the paper stock and whatnot. Pat let me use the big Xerox copier/printer as much as I liked, provided I brought in a ream of paper now and then, and I used the hell out of that, printing sheet music on punched paper for my traveling books. The drive to and from eventually became practice for taking pictures from a moving car. For a year after we moved, I still was doing some things like the web page and newsletter remotely while my replacement got oriented. That's how big the job became: I had a couple days of training. Now I'm old, and I think I wouldn't mind maybe a half day in the office once a week or so, just for the social aspect, but if I must be retired, OH WELL.

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