Thursday, April 23, 2009

Saving the Date

Saving the Date

So you know how a couple of weeks ago I was all like 'Save the Dates are done la-di-da'? What I actually meant was, 'Save the Dates are designed, now let me try and get them printed.'

What I should have done is sent the design to moo.com or vistaprint or some other pay-very-little-get-super-postcards type site.

What I actually did was think that seeing as I live in india, the land of cheap labour, cheap shopping etc, I should get them done here.

Having lived here for over 2 years I'm not exactly green at this stuff, but I always forget how hard it is to actually get stuff done. Typing the whole story will just make me mad again, but it went something like this:

- printer 1 - good thick card. No lamination machine.
- printer 2 - only thin card
- printer 1 - forget the lamination, just go with matt. No green ink.
- back to printer 2 to persuade us to bring card from elsewhere
- printer 1 to buy the card, but they have now run out.
- two day break while I gear myself up to try again
- printer 3. No thick card.
- back to printer 1. Purchase card, which they now have in.
- printer 2. Boss man is there who decides we can't use card from elsewhere.
- sit in a coffee shop until the boss leaves
- get them printed at printer 2
- discard approx 30% due to grubby finger prints, cutting not straight etc
- take to printer 1 to laminate the front.
- get the first batch of 10, which are laminated on both sides. As they're postcards, this means they now can't be written on.
- explain the one-sided lamination bit again
- finally (whoop) get a stack of 83 decent postcards. With only one having to be discarded for what I'm sure was a bogie on the back. Gross.

So yes they were cheap (1200 total, which is about 15 quid), but IT WAS FRIGGIN PAINFUL.

Vistaprint, I will never snub you again.

3 comments:

the un-bride said...

This is hilarious. Thanks for the reminder of why I do (and don't) miss living overseas.

elizabeth said...

oh boy! I'm impressed you stuck with it. I think I might have bailed somewhere in the middle, and emailed my pdf back to the motherland to get printed at 4x the price (which would've felt worth it by then!) hilarious!

Cate Subrosa said...

Ha ha, loved how you told this story. Glad it worked out right in the end.