Walked into the shop today and the prepress operator was bored. That’s either very good or very bad. It could be bad because business is slow. It could very good because work is coming in and going out very fast right to the press.

In this case, because the owner is thinking about buying a new Mac for the prepress room, I think things are okay. In my fifteen plus years of prepress, I have come to believe there is a direct correlation between the financial health of a printing plant, and willingness to buy new Macs.

Anyways, prepress is like surfing. You are either standing on top of the surfboard riding the wave or you are 3 feet underwater. And Prinergy is one nice bigass surfboard.

So this got me to thinking, what was the best Prinergy customer I ever visited? Having travelled to Prinergy sites in 12 different countries (at least) and 15 US states, it was a bit of a difficult choice, but my vote went to IRL in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Those guys were awesome, whenever we had to a beta in Europe, we would try to get those guys in on the program. Go figure, it’s a printer in Switzerland and when you go in the shop, guys are leaving their Flash games up onscreen, and giving each other email addresses like “JamesBond@irl” or whatever. And not a manager in site.

But truly professional, those guys could make a dead rat run a marathon. We would throw a beta in there and not a week would pass without getting a detailed site summary carefully listing all the bugs they encountered and every possible workaround. In near-perfect english. Jeepers, we couldn’t even get our own application specialists in the software group to write decent beta bug reports.

Hope those guys are doing okay, I did work with them back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Good place to work and I hope it stayed that way.  If you see good tech people and no managers then that means the tech guys have good managers standing behind them (99% of the time). But the only problem with good managers is that, sadly, they don’t stay around forever.