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I’ve been using Overnight Prints for my business card, letterhead, and promotional mailer needs for about 3 years now. I have had nothing but positive experiences with them until this last order. Some background information is in order…

The company is based in Santa Ana, California, which is probably no more than a 1 hour drive from downtown Los Angeles on a good day. Every order I’ve placed has arrived at my address in either Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, or Lancaster (depending on where I was living at the time of the order) within 2-3 days of being printed, so I’ve never paid for Next Day or Second Day Air shipping, because that would be a waste of money. Their customer service has been pretty good. The one time I had an order where the cyan plate had printed just slightly out of alignment, I e-mailed them and had a reprint with no questions asked in 2 or 3 days. Their prices are reasonable, and the print quality is decent (I have noticed color shifts between print runs on identical products, probably due to their advice to design products with a generic CMYK profile instead of a specific profile for their press). At least, I can say that about their press in Santa Ana, where all of my previous orders have come from. We’ll see about the stuff that comes from their press in Louisville, Kentucky. Oh, did I forget to mention that now they have a press in Louisville, KY? Wow, that’s funny, because they forgot to mention that too.

So, I ordered my business cards last Friday, and paid an extra $2.00 to get priority printing (not priority shipping). Priority printing just bumps my print job up in their queue. I’m bribing them to cut in line, basically, so that I know I’ll get my stuff in 2-3 days, just in case they’re backed up. Well, I went and checked my UPS tracking number yesterday to discover with shock and horror that my business cards were in Chicago, Illinois, last night, because my cards were printed in Louisville, Kentucky (and I’m not even going to go into the fact that Chicago is not on the way to Los Angeles from Louisville, or how UPS is often the company that proves the Republicans wrong regarding their theory that private industry always does a better job than the government).

So, I e-mailed Overnight Prints’ customer service:

According to UPS, my order shipped out of Louisville, KY. I have a big problem with this. Every order I have placed in the past arrived at my address in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, or Lancaster, CA, within 2-3 days of being printed. That, plus your mailing address in Santa Ana, CA, led me to believe that your printing facilities were in Santa Ana, CA. I upgraded my most recent order to a priority print job, but I did not upgrade the shipping, because every previous experience I’ve had with your company indicated that upgrading the shipping would be a waste of money, as UPS Ground usually gets things from Orange County to every place I’ve lived in 2-3 days. I wanted my order to arrive this week. According to UPS, it won’t arrive until the middle of next week. If you tacked on an extra week of shipping time by printing my order on the other side of the continent after I paid extra money to upgrade the priority of my order so that I might get it a day or so sooner, that makes me extremely unhappy with you. And that’s a shame, because every previous experience I have had with this company has been positive.

Today, I received this response:

Dear Valued Customer,

First allow me to apologize for the misunderstanding in our Ground Turnaround Times. However, if you click our “FAQs” tab located at the top of our webpage and click on the first question “What is our Turnaround Time?” you will see that the very last line of our answer clearly states, “Overnight Prints now prints nationwide. Please keep in mind that times in transit may vary depending on the printing location.” I do apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. Please feel free to contact us should you have any further inquiries.

We appreciate your business and hope you choose Overnight Prints in the future for all your printing needs. Please feel free to contact us if you have any additional questions at (888) 677-2000 or try our new chat feature under the FAQs tab at www.overnightprints.com. Remember to include all previous correspondence and your invoice number when contacting Overnight Prints.

Thank you,

Jennifer
Customer Care Representative
Overnight Prints
E-Mail: service@overnightprints.com
Office: (888) 677-2000

Frequently Asked Questions
http://www.overnightprints.com/main.php?A=faqs

First of all, my name is not Valued Customer. I signed my name to the first e-mail. This isn’t Valued Customer Photography here at www.valuedcustomer.com. Second, the subtext is, “Why don’t you read the FAQ, you idiot?” So this is where I, an allegedly “Valued Customer,” become an asshole:

Well, that’s not good enough. You need to put that disclosure somewhere in the actual ordering process, because repeat customers don’t often check FAQ’s. I shouldn’t have to check the FAQ every time I place an order just because you might have changed something. I feel like I’ve been ripped off, and I don’t feel very valued as a customer by your response, which is not an apology at all, but a dismissal of my concerns. And I will be taking my business elsewhere if I don’t get a real apology and the $2.00 I paid for priority printing refunded, because printing my order 2,000 miles away is not priority service.

Sincerely,
Damian Hopper

And now, the response:

Dear Valued Customer,

First allow me to once again sincerely apologize for any inconvenience our nationwide printing may have caused. However, no compensation can be offered at this time as it also clearly states in our Terms of Service Roman Numeral IX (which you check off that you agree to when placing the order) that:

“Overnight Prints is an international company with printing and shipping locations across the United States and Europe. While we make every attempt to ship from the location nearest you, your order may come from any of our locations. Please be advised that if you are ordering products with a tight deadline, you should select next day air, 2nd day air or 3rd day air to ensure a timely arrival.”

Please click on the following link for our Terms of Service: http://www.overnightprints.com/main.php?A=terms_conditions

Please feel free to contact us should you have any further inquiries.

We appreciate your business and hope you choose Overnight Prints in the future for all your printing needs. Please feel free to contact us if you have any additional questions at (888) 677-2000 or try our new chat feature under the FAQs tab at www.overnightprints.com. Remember to include all previous correspondence and your invoice number when contacting Overnight Prints.

Thank you,
Jennifer
Customer Care Representative
Overnight Prints
E-Mail: service@overnightprints.com
Office: (888) 677-2000

Frequently Asked Questions
http://www.overnightprints.com/main.php?A=faqs

Jennifer,

Why are you risking losing a repeat customer over a matter of $2.00? If it’s a matter of you not having the authority to refund the $2.00, then kick this matter up to someone who does, because I am not letting this go. If you’re going to give people the option of priority printing without priority shipping for an extra fee, and then go print them at some location that is other than the one closest to the shipping address after they pay that extra fee, that is unethical at best. If you appreciate my business, you will quit insinuating that I’m an idiot who can’t follow instructions with these dismissive non-apologies, quit addressing me as “Valued Customer,” because that is not my name (and I’m apparently not that valued, judging from your responses), and refund my $2.00. I’ve worked retail. I’ve had to deal with pain-in-the-ass customers in person, not just via e-mail. So I don’t like to be one. But right now, you’re not leaving me with much other choice.

Sincerely,
Damian Hopper

So, if you’re looking to have business cards, letterhead, envelopes, brochures, postcards, or anything else of that nature printed, I recommend doing business with a company other than Overnight Prints. They were a decent company a few years ago when they were smaller, but now they’re “international,” so they’ve got an international-sized ego. Now they bury everything in fine print on separate pages, and if you don’t look at all of that every time you place an order, well, you’re just a moron–a valued moron–and thanks for giving us extra money to do a crappier job. We hope we can fuck you again soon. Bullshit bullshit bullshit, we’re international and world-class now, and yadda yadda yadda. Have a nice day, loser.

As a business owner, client satisfaction is extremely important to me. I realize there are limits to that. You can’t let problematic people just walk all over you, but that cuts both ways. If you’re willing to lose a repeat client over a matter of $2.00, you should be working at the goddamn Department of Motor Vehicles, where your skill sets would be more appropriate. So, because it’s free and it doesn’t take very long, I pledge to e-mail Overnight Prints’ Customer Care Department a copy of every invoice for every order I ever place with one of their competitors for the rest of my life.

Additional evidence of their unacceptable business practices, now that I’ve bothered to look:
• Los Angeles Better Business Bureau - Overnight Prints Customer Reviews - Overnight Prints has a rating of CCC from the Better Business Bureau, which they claim is a good rating, but it’s a lot closer to the bottom of their scale than it is from the top.
• Overnight Prints is Anything but Overnight Printing | Peanuts to Profits with Thor Schrock
• mediabistro.com: Bulletin Board: Designers’ Corner: Topic: Issue with Overnightprints.com
• Overnight Prints (see comments)
• Amazon.com: Overnight Prints: Website Details - Overnight Prints has a 2.5-star vendor rating at Amazon.com. Speaking of Amazon.com, I have never had a problem not reviewing their FAQ and TOS every time I place an order with them.
• Beware Overnight Prints - Digital Grin Photography Forum - different problem, but contains another excellent example of how they think they can do no wrong, and everything is the customer’s fault.
• Broadsheet: Never Use OvernightPrints.com, Ever.
• Complaints Board | Overnight Prints
• Jason Burgess - Beware of OvernightPrints.com - with plenty more links to complaints

I have finished the redesign of the website. I just haven’t done the blog yet. So, navigation from the blog to the galleries is going to be a little clunky until I figure out how I want to do this.

Anyway, thanks to Jon Dobres for his input on the fonts. Although I did not choose any of the fonts he specifically suggested, he was correct in pointing out that my initial font choice was hard to read, and therefore, no bueno.

To compliment the new site design, I also designed new business cards, even though I still have 300 or so of the last batch. (I’m also tinkering with new letterhead).

Which side is the front, and which is the back is up for debate. The photo side will have a glossy coating, and the info side will not.

Jarrod has started to prefer going to the gym in the evening. I definitely prefer mornings. Evenings do not work for me. It imposes on my routine much more, especially if I go when Jarrod goes. It’s like it requires extra steps or something… extra showers, extra changing of clothing, screwing up my eating schedule, etc.

Here’s how it works in the morning, on a relaxed schedule (on days when I don’t have a training session, this can be bumped up an hour to an hour and a half):
7:00 AM: Get up, put gym clothes on, eat something.
7:40 AM: Drive to the gym, work out, come home.
9:15 AM: Shower, shave, put on decent clothes.
10:00 AM: Get to whatever work I’m doing that day.

Here’s how it works in the evening:
5:50 PM: Stop what I’m doing, change clothes
6:00 PM: Drive to the gym, work out, come home.
7:20 PM: Debate whether to shower for the second time that day and change back into other clothes, or just sit around and smell a little funky.
7:30 or 8:00 PM (depending on the shower decision): Eat dinner late, and wonder what the hell happened to my evening.

So, in the morning, it’s just something I can stick between breakfast and my shower. It’s part of my start-up routine. In the evening, it’s this whole special thing to do that takes up more time than it needs to because of the extra hygiene involved. The shower in the morning doesn’t go away just because I don’t go to the gym, but I do kinda have to add another one if I go in the evening. So, ixnay on the evening gym sessions.

Hey kids, do you know what time it is? That’s right! It’s time for another all-new installment of Damian’s Epic Saga of Car Trouble!™ Woo!

I had a shoot in Alhambra today. Since most of my projects lately have been in Lancaster, that’s where I’ve been spending most of my time, and the quickest way from Lancaster to Alhambra is via Angeles Forest Highway/Angeles Crest Highway. But that is not a road I like to drive the truck on because the truck is 30 years old and handles like a 30-year-old truck. So I borrowed my mother’s sedan, a 92 Ford Taurus given to her by her father. The drive down was smooth. The event went well. I shot close to 100 pictures. The venue was smaller than last time, but there was quite a bit more media interest. The last event for this program I shot, there was one other still photographer and 2 news crews. This time, at least half a dozen news crews. Crammed in a small space. But, I actually got some cool stuff out of that:

Anyway, driving back to Lancaster through the National Forest, I noticed smoke coming out of the back of the car in the mirror. Thought it might just be dust being kicked up by the wind. Then the rear wheels momentarily lost traction, and I started to fishtail. Got it under control on the first swing, so it didn’t swing back. Wondered what the hell just happened. Then on the next turn, it fishtailed again, this time much more violently, but I recovered pretty quickly. At that point, I said, “Fuck this, I’m pulling over as soon as I’ve got the space,” wondering if I had a flat tire or something. Also, the transmission started freaking out as I started going uphill. It was slipping all over the place. So, I got it off the road, walked around the car to check the tires, noticed the smoke was coming from the engine compartment now that the car was stopped, popped the hood, couldn’t see anything, looked under the car and noticed a steady, heavy drip coming from the back of the engine. At the very least, the car had sprung a pretty significant transmission fluid leak, and if particularly heavy spray had hit the rear tires, that could have caused the momentary loss of traction. This, I knew, would not make my mother happy, as she just paid for a new starter on the car two weeks ago. But, whatever… I needed to call AAA to get a tow into town. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and “No signal.” At this point, it looked like things might start to get out of hand. I considered my options. I could go climb one of the mountains to see if I could get a signal from a higher elevation. That would be manly. If that failed, I had plenty of water in the car… I could have walked the 13 miles into Acton. That would be manly too. But, we’re looking at 3 or 4 hours of wandering around in desert mountains in a dress shirt and tie. Angeles Forest Highway is a fairly well-traveled road, even at 12:30 in the afternoon, and well-traveled probably means well-patrolled. So, I could wait for a forest ranger to come along to give me a ticket for parking in the National Forest without an “Adventure Pass,” and he could call a tow-truck while he’s at it. Not so manly, but probably my best option.

By the way, for anyone not familiar with the “Adventure Pass,” what it is is a fee that you must pay to use public lands… like for the National Parks, only, now your tax dollars no longer pay for your use of certain National Forests, because our government is too busy giving your tax dollars to con artists like Bear Stearns while they borrow money from China to fund their “Kill American Servicemen and Brown People” program. I find it offensive for so many reasons, but the one most relevant to the topic at hand is that, clearly, I do not need to buy a pass to have an adventure in the National Forest. I’m special that way. I don’t go lookin’ for the shit, okay; it finds me.

Anyway, while debating my options with myself, some good samaritans pulled up and offered to give me a lift to the only phone on the road, at the Hidden Springs Cafe. An interesting place, this cafe. The coffee was good black (I normally detest black coffee), and the pie smelled wonderful. I may have to stop next time I go through for coffee and pie, despite the absence of coffee and pie on the meal plan my trainer put together for me. Anyway, I was able to use the phone at the cafe to call AAA. AAA is clearly not set up to handle rural environments… at least not in California. The only information I could give them was the name of the road and the mile marker the car was at, and the name of the place where I was. This caused trouble. They wanted an address, including city, which prompted my response, “Um, I’m not in a city. I’m in a national forest.” The operator eventually figured out how to direct the tow truck driver to my location, and told me he would be there by 1:38. I passed the time listening to the proprietor of the cafe discuss various odd topics with the small assortment of patrons, a couple of whom arrived in a dune buggy. The tow truck arrived at 2:30. It was 3:30 before I got home. Mind you, I was supposed to get home around 1:15, and have a few images up on my server for Scott and Lucila to download by 3:30. Thankfully, as much as I complain about the Cat Fancy job I had for 4 months giving me a mild case of Office Ass, the speed at which I can retouch and color correct increased exponentially while working for them. 5 minutes is heavy retouching for me now. So, I was able to get a number of images up by 4:30 (I may have gotten home at 3:30, but I still had to wait for the car to be unloaded and then spend 30 minutes downloading the RAW files off the flash card).

The day got me thinking about the technology we’ve come to depend on, and how lost we are without it. Cell phones, GPS navigation, and iPods are three technologies that have come about in my lifetime. I lived my life just fine before they came along, but now that I have them, the idea of living without them seems problematic at best. Especially the iPod. My god, what would I do without an iPod? Carry a bunch of CD’s with me in the car and change them as I drive? Madness, I say! Once I saw my cell phone had no signal and decided I didn’t want to climb a mountain, I started going through the GPS to see if there was anyplace nearby that might have a phone. Of course, the closest thing it listed was not the place I ended up going to, but a place 8 miles away. 8 miles away geographically. I probably would have had to walk more like 15 if I actually wanted to get to it. So, my drive home was an exercise in the failure of essential technology. Well, that’s not fair. The iPod still performed exceptionally. Yet, I took it all in stride. I didn’t panic. I didn’t get upset. I evaluated my situation and considered my options. I wasn’t even all that pissed that the tow truck showed up almost an hour later than AAA said it would. Not to toot my own horn, but I do tend to handle crises pretty well. As my mother said when I related the story to her, “Well, as wrong as this may sound, I’m glad that happened while you were driving and not me, because I would’ve freaked out.”

Of course, as far as the epic scale of this particular entry in the Saga of Car Trouble, this is bested only by the time my axles fell apart 5-10 miles east of Tucumcari, New Mexico, where I was stranded for 4 days, eating nothing but Denny’s because I got 10% off the bill with my room key.

This is going to be a busy week for me. I had a shoot with a couple of trainers last Thursday, another tomorrow, and then a corporate event this Thursday. This basically means that when I’m not shooting this week, I’m going to be at the computer editing and touching up. Oh, how I loathe post-production. I’ve had a number of people ask me about my post-production abilities lately, and I’ve said that while I’m pretty good at it, it’s not something I enjoy doing, so I don’t really advertise that service anymore… I’ll do it as a paid favor for friends who get really busy, but I spent 4 months as a magazine publisher’s Photoshop monkey, and I don’t want to do that again.

Of course, spending all my free time through the weekend (I am very strict with myself about maintaining no more than a 7-day turnaround on digital shoots, regardless of volume) buried in Photoshop means I will probably not get my website redesign up by Thursday as I had planned. There’s not a lot left to do. I pretty much have 4 finished images to prep and 2 more from Lee’s Carrizo Plains trip to process for the Things gallery, and redesign the blog. The blog will the time consuming part, because I really want to integrate it into the website much more than I have in the past. I’ve been tweaking existing templates to make it look similar to my web design by use of graphics. I want to make it look like just another page on my site, but also design it in such a way that it can still be viewed independently of the rest of the website. That is going to be a small project, and may take a few days that I just don’t have this week. Other than that, it’s going well. I shot the product shot of the Hasselblad and the self-portraits and composited them together for the About page last week. Here’s how that looks:

I’d like to rewrite what I’ve written on the About page, but considering how long it took me to come up with what I’ve got… I hate writing anything remotely close to an artist’s statement. But since I will be dividing the work I show into commercial and fine art, I need to write something for the About page that reflects both pursuits.

I got a postcard from the college informing me that my application packet “has been forwarded to the appropriate division for review.” So that’s moving along. I expect I’ll meet with the dean in the next couple of weeks. I’m not being cocky. I just have a current full-time faculty member in my corner. That doesn’t mean I’ll actually get a job teaching; it just means that I will very likely get an interview with the dean.

A trip to Boston next month may be in the cards. Haven’t been there since October of ‘06. I don’t know how long I’ll spend out there yet, but it would be nice to rent a car for a day to drive up to New Hampshire to visit some of the new found extended family that I didn’t know about when I was living in Boston. It would also be nice to take some pictures. I did not do that when I was living there. Of course, the first two months I was there, I was on independent study doing an internship for my last session at Brooks, and at the time, I was so sick of school and the way they insisted I do everything that I just didn’t want to shoot anything. It took several months after I graduated to get out of that. So, I’d been back in California for a while before I was willing to pick up a camera again, and then it was several more months before I was willing to work on anything I’d shot.

This is why it’s important to always shoot personal work. I heard that a lot while I was a student, but never really took the time to develop my own ideas, as I was so absorbed in keeping up with the pace of the school. Brooks can definitely chew you up and spit you out if you let it. Anyway, as a result of devoting all my energy to assigned work, it pretty much ceased to be mine, and I lost most of the joy in photography. It took a good eight months of self-indulgent rehab to get to a place where I felt like my work was my own again.

So anyway, now that I’m back in that place, I’m very excited to go back to Boston for a few days to visit some of the friends I made and take the pictures I didn’t when I lived there. The big question for me is, “What camera(s) do I want to take?”