Blaming Is Useless, Craigslist Is Reliable and a Mistake Becomes Fun
It’s very bad news when a brochure finds itself printed with something missing. That is one of the reasons why I prefer making websites so much, because the time to add or change simple things like text is about the same as the it takes to open and close the proper softwares.
The mistake
In the case of brochures, a missing text is a bad thing. But when the absence of a legal text can put the brochure off the market, it’s a pain in the ass. You’re sure that the law will tell you to retrieve all brochures from the stands and you would have printed thousands of them for nothing wasting a few tens of thousands of dollars.
The blame
When something like this happens, or any kind of mistakes for that matter, placing blame is the worst, most useless and most unproductive thing ever. The only purpose of blame is to save trouble for one or multiple parties and it puts a big fat black mark on the relationship of every party involved. So placing blame is a non-step that doesn’t lead anywhere good. Sure, investigations can be made, but that’s should be for the sole purpose that the mistake should not be made again.
The solution
The productive way of dealing with mistakes and the step that is actually important is finding a solution. Personnally, I am glad that it was a legal text that was missing rather than anything else, because legally, you can pretty much put that anywhere in the brochure as long as it’s somewhere and of proper size according to the law.
I suggested to print the text on stickers which would be put on the back cover where it would be visible and easier and simpler to stick than inside the brochure. This idea beat putting a paper with the text on in the brochure and it was far more elegant than cutting a letter size paper in half and stappling it.
There were 7000 brochures. In the beginning, I thought about doing the sticking all by myself. The right idea is popping up in your mind right now: it’s lonely, boring and very long to do alone. So while the stickers were being printed I decided to look for people. I didn’t need qualified people. Seriously, how qualified you have to be to put stickers properly?
craigslist
Craigslist is a world renown website that features classifieds ads. It’s free to look at and free to post ads. You can even hook up with someone, but never having done it, I don’t know how those people turn out to be. By the way, if you mistype and forget that first S in craigSlist.com, you will get to a porn website, so make sure not to make that mistake if there are people around who shouldn’t see porn.
On an afternoon, I put up an ad on craigslist and within an hour, I lost count of all the applicants, so I quickly removed the ad. Since there are pretty much no qualifications required except the one “to get somewhere”, I was looking for interesting people, so I asked them about their age, what they did, planned to do and other stuff any employer wouldn’t ask for like their photos. When is the last time your employer asked you for your photo?
The people
I chose three people who were 20, 26 and 43 years old. If there was someone with a funny hat, I would have chosen them. I was more looking for fun and interesting rather than qualified. Granted that you don’t need qualifications for sticking labels, I think that we should always put fun and interesting on the same level as qualified, because those people often end up to be the most reliable.
Back to craigslist
At the last minute, one of the three musketeers backed out, so I had to choose between being lazy and do nothing about it or put up another ad to find someone. I chose the latter. I did that out of boredom, because I was more interested in getting the job done quickly. The responses didn’t come in as quickly as the first time, but I did choose someone.
The work
This morning, we got to the warehouse where the brochures were stored. They were already put next to a table where we worked. The stickers came in four rolls and there were about 40 boxes of 150 brochures. Indeed, it turned out there weren’t 7000 brochures after all.
We started at about 9:30 A.M. and finished one box at a time. I put myself in charge of opening and closing boxes to keep the quantity correct and it allowed me to check on the other’s work once in a while. There were the occasional bubbles, but it wasn’t so bad. We finished at 3 or 4 P.M. (I don’t remember) with a lunch break which lasted the amount of time it took us to feel like working again.
The end
This was fun and I got to listen to interesting conversations. If I had to hire them again, I don’t know if I would. They were great and that’s the problem. Do I hire people who are good and whom I got to know or do I take another shot at meeting new interesting strangers? But like I just said, I got to know them, so I could hire them for the skills specific to each one of them.
I’ve had a taste of what it was like to be in charge of people and I like the idea of being a boss. There isn’t much room for being bossy about sticking labels, but things are pretty great when everybody agrees with your methods. Everyone was quick and efficient. Nobody got bored, tired or anything generally regarded as negative. I would start my own company, but I have neither money nor reputation which is currently pretty much the most important thing to me.
The only compaint I have about this day is very personal. It seems that lifting those boxes, as light as they were, has had some consequences on the muscular rupture that occured in my arm in my biking accident. Right now, it feels like someone is contantly trying to bend my arm. I am in constant pain.
