Welcome back to my Print Blog! For those of you who were kind enough to read the first installment, you will know that I am the new girl on the print block at Essential Print Services and I am writing about all of the weird and wonderful experiences that I will have along my journey of discovery in the print industry.

In my last blog I explained why I was drawn to the print industry specifically and the excitement and trepidation that comes with such new experiences. As expected, I have a number of experiences to tell you about!

Here’s my favourite from the past week…

It was an ordinarily busy Tuesday in the Essential Print Office and at around 4:40pm – the time where you are desperately trying to finish your open tasks for the day – the phone rang and the caller was a very nice man from a large local company in Derby who had some very important CAD drawings that he needed to deliver to a client first thing in the morning. No problem, I thought, we can have them ready in the morning; this will be an easy one.

But when the gentleman said first thing – he meant it! There was no time to complete this job in the morning; he was going to need 8 x A2 CAD drawings printed in the next hour. Now for those of you who don’t know, A2 is a rather large print size. Of course The Print Evangelist never likes to turn down an opportunity to overcome an obstacle and suddenly I felt like we were on an episode of ‘Challenge Anneka’!

Now if you’ve never seen Challenge Anneka, firstly let me say that you missed out on a fantastic BBC One show between 1989 and 1995 (where were you?) whereby Anneka Rice was given tasks to complete within a certain period of time with no knowledge of the task before it began and she would have to organise it’s completion by a certain deadline.

Suddenly, I was transported back to 1995 and the episode was in full swing. We needed to print – and we needed to print, fast. We didn’t have a helicopter, which I think you’ll agree was a rather unfair advantage from the offset, but we did have a steely determination and a deadline to meet.

So did we manage to complete this job without a hitch? Absolutely. Not only that, we had the print ready for collection along with some Haribo and a smile at 6:05pm. Phew!