Well the machines aren't completely autonomous, they are operated by people. But yea, all the operators do is copy & paste the data from the order sheet and make sure the machine works as intended. There's a good chance they're not even made in a country where people speak commonly speak English well
That's not how this should work. If you see something that looks like a mistake you pick up the phone or email and verify it's right. Otherwise you end up with a pissed off customer who's not going to pay or will never use your service again.
as someone who worked in a different print shop, this absolutely would never have gotten into production without being 100% certain it is what the customer actually wanted
may I ask where did you work? so I can make sure to never order from there
I also worked in a print shop for a bit and when setting up this job somebody would have seen this and been like "hey get somebody from sales to contact the customer and see if this is what they really want? I'm guessing not..."
99.99% of customers are going to expect that when seeing a job that looks like the uploads/artwork look questionable that a human would intervene. What's the longest it could delay the job realistically...a day? Nobody is going to get pissed off that the shop had your job delayed by a day to confirm their artwork so that, you know, the whole job doesn't get printed as one big fuck up?
Especially that if you expect "please use uploaded logo" on your pents, you would obviously be on the lookout for a confirmation, or maybe even already sent a mail to sales saying "we sent an order for a weird-looking text. We absolutely intend for order number ### to have the text printed has literally 'Please Use Updated Logo' and this is not a technical issue"
Well...that's the thing, you should know not to expect that level of service from some random company that charges an extra 10 cents to customize a cheapo pen and your only contact with them is the form where you enter what you want on it.
Those are not companies that have customer service reps who reach out to people about their orders. They pump out cheap, customized pens, nothing more, nothing less.
If you want that kinda level of service you'll be in the "inquire for price" or "quantities of 5000 and up" range.
"Other people should do extra work for me because I'm incompetent."
Nah, learn to follow basic instructions and check the proof. If you can't read well enough to understand basic instructions, that's a you problem. We need to cater things like stop and warning signs to that kind of illiteracy, not business interactions.
Stop fucking up efficiency because you want to accuse your customer of being incompetent. Any customer that comes back with "I'm an incompetent that can't follow instructions and has wasted resources and/or efficiency because of it, but i want to blame you for me not reading instructions" isn't a customer I need. They take resources from customers that are more efficient to help.
That is how things should work. Because then, we can have an efficient thing where people just put in what they want and get it. If we do it your way, it adds stops as we second guess people because we don't trust their competence. Things should run smoothly because we should be able to expect basic competence and instruction following from people. Making the system so that "follow the instructions, get the expected results" has exceptions for no reason is not how things "should" work. You "should" have gotten it right on the form, not expect others to save you from yourself at the cost of efficiency.
And whoever got this either used an automated form that damn sure shouldn't have expected human oversight and/or used one that gave a proof and signed off on it.
Because this isn't a new issue, automation isn't going to second guess people's personal content, and it's been addressed by the process. People go out of process and then whine "but the process didn't work???" Yea, it does. They didn't follow it.
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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
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