Gordonated

Honestly.

I noticed that I haven’t been posting stuff that people will read recently. Believe me, having a blog that carries the name of your company is not so easy. There are a lot of critical people out there reading this. To even post a simple post about issues concerning work are extremely sensitive.

The flowers below seems to attract a lot of girls to this blog (my intuitive sense of the female creature informs me that) and my ‘viral train’ post is actually bringing the virus across the office that actually almost all of us here at work fell sick (!) Yeah, we were down with flu, coughing, sore-throats and all that.

Well, I guess its time to start something more serious rather than posting beautiful flowers in here.

Let me start with a joke.

Over here, we have our regular printer who handles most of our bread and butter accounts. Nice chap who brings us hampers and snacks sometimes. One thing with dealing with printers in Malaysia especially, majority of them will be Chinese educated (in our case at least). So, being able to speak Cantonese or Chinese helps in dealing with suppliers. Me, after 6 years of tutored among 4 others to master my mother tongue is no exception (My Chinese is not so good actually).

Usually, I will speak to him in Chinese + English and a little Malay language to get the message across. Everything is usually said with much care and you must really make sure that the message gets across. Double confirmations are essentials and status of production has to be monitored strictly. You wouldn’t feel so good if a certain booklet is late for delivery because it was stapled upside down; which brings me to my tale:

On the evening of the Kancil Awards 2007, just right before the prestigeous event of the Malaysian Advertising Awards, a call came in from the management saying that the booklets (which are suppose to be ready on the dinner tables before 7pm) have not yet arrive. The time was about 6.45pm. A call was made to the printer and these two words came along with such haste:

“Lei Gan*!”

Repetitively it sounds like this in about 203 bpm:

“Lei Gan! Lei Gan! Lei Gan! Lei Gan! Lei Gan!”

Because most Malaysian’s use the word “ah” or “lah” :

“Lei Gan ah! Lei Gan lah! Lei Gan ah! Lei Gan lah! Lei Gan ah! Lei Gan lah! ”

What happened was that at the last minute, the poor printer realized that the booklets were stapled upside down on the inside! It wouldn’t be nice for such a prestigious event to have a booklet that reads the other way round, even-tough that was suppose to be the night for creatives around Malaysia..

I’m pretty sure at that point of time, the poor printer must have panicked!

Yeah, this might sound funny but, I took a very important lesson out of it. I wouldn’t put the entire blame on him. You see, the process goes on so complex that there are so many other external factors that might appear during designing, production and in this case, include delivery.

Usually, the raw files that we get from various sources require a lot of time to extract and organize. Some in word form, power point, JPEG, TIFF, AI version 9, Corel Draw, etc.Usually, they will be in a mess and sometimes, most of the time, missing information or wrong information. Sometimes, a few rounds of going through is needed before even sending out for approval. Believe me, its a head-ace.

So, because of this, it drags that process, making it slower and stagnent. By the time everything is approved and ready for production, the poor printer will have only a week or a few days for production. If something goes wrong, you better pray for grace and ask for a miracle.

Because of all this, I begin to notice the importance of planning out. I’m very bad when it comes to planning work. Preferably, I will take my time to make everything as close to solving the problem as possible. Time is always against this. Few days ago, I got motivated to work fast with hope of getting as close as possible to the solution needed (This happened because I spent 3 months on Bob Dylan’s Chronicles. Oh well, lets just see what happens.

Lei Gan ah! Lei Gan ah!

* Lei Gan means rushing in Cantonese. Okay, the “lah” and “ah” are my own interpretations.. The printer is actually a very nice guy. The story ended with a happy ending; the printer delivered it right before the event started. Everybody was happy getting awards that night.