Just sent off Transit to the printers. Spent yesterday and this morning getting more and more frazzled. I was trying to put the magazine together, discovered that a regular contributor couldn’t make it. So I had to delete four pages and rearrange the rest of the magazine. Then discover a couple of items that I had forgotten to include, and rearrange the layout a second time.
In the middle of this, B informed me that our main laser printer – the one we do all our heavy-duty printing on – had just gone to the great recycling dump in the sky. Could I please get on the web and hunt down a suitable replacement, like yesterday?
Yes B, of course I can do it. Very simple – just type “laser printer” into the search engine. Oh, and yes, of course I can print out the full tech specs for each one – not forgetting the VAT-inclusive prices and delivery charges. But I managed all that, the ink in my deskjet kindly not running out until I had finished it all. And I carried on putting a magazine together, as well.
This morning, an email reminding me that Transit had to be at the printers NOW – but I’m still waiting for a last inclusion to arrive. It’s another regular contribution, and always takes up two to three pages. So I’ve set aside three pages for it. At lunchtime, it arrives – a very short effort that I’m going to have to stretch to fit even one page.
So, that’s two pages I have to rearrange and fill with something. Using my DTP-fu, I coax one section to stretch over into an additional page without it looking grotesque; unfortunately, that means having to go through it to tidy up the orphan lines thus created. But there’s still one page empty! So I go through the back issues and find a page of jokes from two years back – hopefully, very few readers will remember them from the first time around.
Then a last visual check-through, hit the ‘convert to PDF’ button and email it off.
Phew!
Now, all I have to get frazzled about is finding some way of paying for a new printer…..