Week 11: Real Letters!

My boss brought in the digital caliber, and I was able to accurately measure the letterpress blocks. I got all the dimensions, and got to printing another G. The next goal is to print all the letters in the alphabet, I think I’m sticking with all caps for now.

I printed out a properly sized G! I’m confident it could be used interchangeably with the lead letters of the same size.

This was another week of finishing projects. Much of the begining of the week was spent researching and cleaning the studio etc. I thought that the Friday would be similar, but boy how I was wrong. People slowly came streaming in, all in the first printmaking class, all trying to digital print on the last day before the weekend before their project was due.

Honestly, not many very interesting things happened. I helped a lot of students print their projects. Of course this meant that there were a lot of hiccups, but most people were able to be out in a reasonable amount of time.

There were two students that I think were most interesting (everyone else was pretty regular, with the process running pretty smoothly). The first looked to be an older student. I’d guess they were in their late-30s. They were in the studio for a while and I asked if they needed help, but they would always say no. They seemed to be familiar with photoshop, so I let them be. When they were about ready to print, I looked over their images, about to calculate the ink cost. What we do at the studio is take the image size, then mentally subtract the white space. The student wondered about that incredulously (Most ink fees tend to be about $4. This is HARDLY a high-stakes situation, so yes, our official practice could be referred to as “slightly winging it”). We enter the estimated ink area into a calculator spreadsheet on the computers, then tell the student the cost. I was calculating it when the student asked to do it. They had been pretty disrespectful up to now, so I said sure and went to help the other students that were starting to file in. Much of the student’s tone during the entire process was that I had no idea what I was doing. I was beyond being hurt or upset by this; I simply couldn’t be bothered. I did think about the fact that the student probably felt in an odd situation: they were familiar with the tech, and they had rely on some 20-year-old to print their images. They probably felt like they were being talked down to or something.

I understand those feelings. However, I have no energy left in my body to spare to catering to that entitlement. It’s funny to me that many boomers say “millennials” (which is an awful term already that has just come to mean “the youth”) are entitled when truly, I find the complete opposite is true. All of my friends have worked in the service industry, and we are all braced for the harsh reality that, despite our hundreds of thousands of dollar degrees, we’ll probably be back in the service industry soon enough. In such an industry, it is consistently the boomers that get mad at individual workers. They seem to have no empathy, and no ability to see that the problem they are likely frustrated about has NOTHING to do with the individual worker they’re yelling at. More so, the worker likely doesn’t even have the power to do anything about it. Even MORE so, they’re probably just as frustrated about the problem as you are. They could have even brought up the problem with their higher-ups already, surely getting no response. On top of all of this, they’re likely hardly making more than minimum wage (that, at least, has been my experience and they experience of my fellow kitchen-mates).

So, I couldn’t be bothered with this students entitlement. They eventually paid their ink fee and I set up their paper. After it printed, they were bothered that their seemed to be a centimetre away from the border. I told them that this was in the printer’s margin of space that it won’t print, so it’s to be expected. As I was about to attend to the other students looking to print, they said,” No, we should try to solve this.” I responded very frankly that 1. It’s within the margin of area that’s to be expected of the printer. The student could easily rip off the extra edge, but it wouldn’t even make a discernible difference in their piece. 2. We likely wouldn’t be able to “solve” it, and 3. There were multiple other students looking to print that moment. There was a lineup that had built up in this time, and I had to attend to them. The student seemed frustrated, but let it drop. I was, honestly, very proud of myself for being so outright. Everything I said was true, and I said it politely but firmly. I’ve been described as brash and confrontational, which I certainly think I am, but I think it’s good that I won’t sacrifice my values or the truth for the sake of capitalism or the workplace. It’s often looked down upon women to be outspoken, so I think it’s sort of an act of resistance to lay it all out. I also think that I’ve gotten better at not being too harsh. I’ve softened the delivery much more than I did in the past, but the message remains firm. I’m very proud of that.

The next student was a man. Honestly, up until he arrived, it seemed like everyone I’d helped was a woman. In the lab, there was a very clear order of things: I would bounce person to person, keeping in mind who had arrived first, and use that in calculation with who was ready/ closest to being ready to print. When the students were being taught how to digital print, it was made pretty clear that they would have to print on the lab computers. The student basically expected to print from their laptop then leave. Of course, printing in this lab is far from easy.

After I’d told him he’d have to print off one of the computers, I asked if he had a flash-drive, the easiest way to move files from devices. He said no, and I told him to ask around till he found one. Once he was on the computer, he loudly bemoaned that Apple’s interface was not intuitive. I kept my mouth shut, because I had no interest in entering this asinine debate, but Apple is literally designed to be intuitive. Having grown up with exclusively PCs, I can say with confidence that Apple is miles more intuitive than PC. But that, of course, is not really important. The main take away from his comments for me were the fact that this man thought he could jump onto an entirely new operating system and have it make sense to him immediately. That feeling of “I know how to do things very well, so if I have a problem, it is the operating system’s fault” is baffling. I as a women have never felt that dark form of confidence. Most of the time, myself and my I’ll be honest here: I’ve been feeling particularly done with masculinity in general. As I felt with the student who was trying to tell me how to use the 3D printer, I’ve come to trust when things feel different. All day I’d been dealing with students, and no other students acted like this (again, all seemed to be women). So I was already feeling a bit iffy.

While I was fully engaged with another student, he said “Hey sorry to interrupt but…” He didn’t really finish his sentence, I assume because he then noticed that I was deeply focused with another student about to print, and he was very rudely interrupting.

He had work to go to after this, which he made very clear. He called his boss in the small lab and told him everything. I was so livid, this was so wildly inappropriate. I had no plans to give him any preference above all of these other students that came before just because he has poor time-management skills. I understand what it’s like to be in a pinch, and I know this process is long. But that assumed entitlement that calling your boss to tell them that the printing is taking longer than expected will garner you a priority position in the lab is so wildly beyond what I understand as appropriate behavior. This is completely unprecedented. Everyone before that has been in a time crunch has told me and we’ve worked out how they can print at another time or somehow make it work, of course involve give and take from both of us. This man did none of that. He passive aggressively called his boss instead of talking to me. Likely he did this because this is plainly his problem, it’s really directly all his fault that he’ll be late to work because of his own poor time management. I won’t push back the other students just because of this guy.

I know the other students would have probably allowed for him to go before them, for the sheer reasons that 1. they had already planned their projects well enough to not be pressed in such a similar way, and 2. women have been raised to be passive and facilitate the convenience of others around them. It’s directly because of how kind I knew these women would be that I kept them in the proper priority for their position.

My shift ended before it was his turn to print, so my boss dealt with him. I felt bad leaving my boss with a whole list of people that needed to print, but I knew he could handle it. Plus, my shift was off, so that was that. Next week was more exciting, I promise.