I am in the middle of starting a web development business and I have designed some stationary for myself. Good stuff and it will serve my business well, I hope.
My business card design is a high resolution image fit to be printed on a 3.5 x 2 inch business card; pretty straight forward stuff. I needed some business cards fast (that day) so I took a thumb drive with my files to Fedex Office.
The place was grossly understaffed. I had to wait for 15 minutes to even have someone take my thumb drive and put it in the computer at the counter. Finally, after standing around with my finger up you know where, a man finished with his customer and took my thumb drive. This man was new and I could see it a mile away. It also should be noted that this man didn't seem to have much going for him. Overweight and maybe a little slow I'm not sure. Many times during this experience I considered thanking them for their time and taking my files somewhere else in town, but I had a soft spot for this guy's struggle.
He opened up my file in some sort of proprietary fedex software (as a programmer myself I didn't particularly care for it much). There were two other people in the office, but they were running around like busy stressed out bees and couldn't help even if they wanted to. I was stuck with this guy and this was really starting to turn into a timesink but, as I often do, I soldiered on for some reason.
After some nonesense and me trying not to tell the guy how to do his job (it's not like I know how to run the program even if I don't agree with how it was layed out, but I was starting to learn it by watching his mistakes) he finally "sorted it out." He showed me the "second tier" business card paper. I asked him if this was the type of paper that put a slight bow in the final cards, he assured me they would not bow so I took his advice.
I left after the order was filled which took a grand total of about 45 minutes. Logically I gave this guy too much of my time, but a part of me wanted to oversee him a bit because I knew he had a high chance of screwing up my order and another part just felt sorry for him. I wanted to give him some experience because if he continued working at the level he was working at he would soon not have a job.
I went back a few hours later after getting a message on my work phone that they were done. I went back and stood in line to get my cards and pay for them. He pulled out the box of 250 cards; it had a lid. I had a strong hunch that the cards were not gonna be good. When he went to pick them up to "show me the product" I winced a little inside. "How are they?" He asked. I pulled out a random card from the box and I might have really winced that time. I purposefully hid the front of the card from him and put it back within the box. It was a 0/10 type of thing. The card had been cut so badly that about a half centimeter from the top of the card was showing the bottom of the card above it (on the whole sheet).
I was having a good day. The job that this dude did was going to get himself fired. I know business since I have ran many in my life. This was a show stopper kind of thing. So I had to make a decision. Do I complain which will almost certainly put this man on the street? I could tell just by my experience with him that we was not "new enough" to use that as an exuse for total incompetence. What did I do?
I paid for the cards, which was only a menial amount of money, swallowed the rest and went on my way. Someone else could faciltate his firing because I just knew it would have ruined my day if I had been the one.
Also, as I look at some of the cards sitting on my desk, all the cards have slight bows in them.
-Sab