Ease Your Pain And Suffering — Cagle
BUSINESS of print
OK, SO it’s 12:30 a.m., and my 3-month-old son is screaming his head off. Out comes the formula, a fresh Huggie for his bottom and an audience with yours truly, barely able to keep his eyes open during the feeding.
Needing animation to keep from dozing off (and fumbling the newborn), I switch on the TV and find the Game Show network, knowing that the “Match Game” has ended. That leaves “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” or at least the second half hour with Regis.
Some schmoe actually uses a life line for a simple $8,000 question and still gets it wrong. Gah, what a moron. Take your thousand bucks and slink back to Elk Grove Village, Rhodes Scholar.
Then comes the commercial, and it’s a somber voice touting a law firm. The voice is deadly serious...do you have Acute Myelogenous Leukemia? Do you know what it is, the creepy voice inquired? Heck no, I botched the $16,000 health question.
Well, gentle readers, apparently it is caused by exposure to benzene, a solvent used by your favorite industry. And just to make sure you were aware of its existence, the TV ad lists those professions most likely exposed to the agent. At the bottom of the list, bigger than life, it reads the “printing industry.”
The attorney’s Website notes that the use of benzene, as a solvent, has been banned in this country for more than 20 years, but still exists in most petroleum solvents.
This is, of course, another classic cash grab advertisement by the Ambulance Shyster Society, seeking to prey on the unfortunate victims of disease and debilitation. These cunning lawyers succeed by putting a face on their clients’ pain and suffering—in this case, their clients’ employer/insurance company. That these TV spots run at 1 a.m. is curious; do the lawyers envision an uninitiated, unemployed sloth, sprawled out on the couch, waiting for his ship to come in? Nah...we’ll take the high road and suggest that this firm preferred the cheaper overnight TV ad rates.
Certainly, anyone with any form of cancer has certainly been dealt a lousy hand. It’s just sickening to see opportunists seeking to leverage them for financial gain.
FAT CAT: The company formerly known as Ripon Community Printers has landed in the Guinness World Records annals via the Aviall product and catalog book. Aviall was recognized by the world records authority for producing the largest printed catalog (standard edition). The airplane parts company, courtesy of the pride of Ripon, WI, ran off a 2,656-page epic that weighed roughly 71⁄2 pounds. Not your traditional coffee table book, but a boon for Ripon. Keep your eyes peeled for the next edition of “Guinness World Book of Records”; there’s no guarantee it will be in there, but it’s not every day that a printer has the chance to gain a level of immortality.
Speaking of Ripon, the company has officially dropped the ‘Community’ portion of its name and will now be known exclusively as Ripon Printers. In the latest issue of the company’s newsletter, President Andy Lyke defends the use of ‘community,’ but laments that the term is too often negatively associated with “small town” and “unsophisticated.” It’s supposed to be associated with fellowship, and for some it connotes a special kinship.
Sadly, part of business is marketing, and Lyke has cause for the decision. The ‘community’ portion was slowly being phased out, anyway, having disappeared from the company logo and Website address.
Frankly, I think a company’s choice of name can be vastly overrated. Too many print providers have invested time, money and resources into sprucing up their names when they should have been focusing on their product and service offerings. But at least Ripon kept the “printer” description in its name and didn’t convert to Ripon Graphic Solutions.
Bottom line: All things being equal, and if (nee RCP) is judged for its quality of work alone, they could call the company Andy’s Photocopy and Fax Service. But perception is reality in business, and Lyke doesn’t want to be seen as provincial.
Incidentally, the name Ripon Community Printers was chosen partly because its acronym matched that of its flagship publication, Ripon Commonwealth Press.
FIGHTIN’ FAKES: As you probably have seen by now, the new $10 bill has rolled off the presses and into circulation, armed with new and improved measures to help combat the scourge of counterfeiting.
According to the Christian Science Monitor, the new bills feature color-changing ink, security strips, watermarks and miniature printing that’s been deemed tough to replicate.
These changes, including magnetic particles embedded in the ink, may make counterfeiting tougher to do. But even if an ersatz bill is only a 75 percent match for the real deal, what’s to say that the cashier at Home Depot, for example, will catch on? Retail cashiers are given a quick crash course on spotting fakes at the time of their hire, but that hardly makes them document authenticators.
In the end, there’s little chance that a government-issued bill could be sophisticated enough to loom beyond a determined counterfeiter’s reach. No matter...our bucks were lagging behind the Euro and others in terms of eye appeal.
—ERIK CAGLE
