DelBloggolo: AND THEN THERE ARE DAZE

Monday, March 02, 2015

AND THEN THERE ARE DAZE

I never make a mistake, I thought I did once, but I was wrong.

Ever have a day where everything goes wrong? It starts by just getting out of bed and doesn’t end until you get back into bed?

Years ago before desktop publishing, I used to design advertising and I had this long statement I had to hand-letter. Hand-lettering took a long time and you tried to replicate the design of the fonts you wanted, so it wasn’t a simple thing of just quick strokes, but repeated strokes and adding things like serifs to the design of the letter style. I did these in either chalk pastels or magic markers and sometimes pen and ink or paint and brushes and it was tedious.

This one assignment had me lettering 20 lines of type on a page about 14 x 20 inches and it was close work. After about 45 minutes to an hour, I finished and looked at the job, and there stood my source of aggravation, I carried the word ‘the’ which ended a line and carried it to the next line too, a typo that looked like: “Can you find the mistake?” I had to re-letter the whole thing once more!

Once going to work, I got a flat tire and was in Old Westbury near C.W. Post College and so had to call my office to tell them I would be late for a big meeting. I was so in a hurry that I put the spare tire on and forgot to tighten the lug nuts! I drove with this wobbly sound and pulled over to realize my mistake!

But of course the worse mistakes are often the time consuming ones like the time I should have put on my GPS and instead went by a map that I downloaded from the Internet. Coming out of a crowded and congested airport for a major highway, I missed a turn and went hours out of my way and instead of getting to my destination in an hour at 3:30, I didn’t get there until late at night in the driving rain. This was Arizona, and it never rains there!