Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Time to stop and breathe

You know how we all used to dream that a knight on a white horse would come and rescue us -- you know, back when we thought of ourselves as fragile and helpless...

I think this image -- with its tired old horse -- sang to me this evening because I've been struggling for the last several hours trying to get a document to print out of InDesign in the same colors I see on my screen. 

It took me a while, but I got Photoshop to print right after I got my new computer.  And they're part of the same software suite, right?  So InDesign should print right as well, right?

Not so -- at least not so far, although I had a small stroke of genius about 5 minutes ago and tried printing a photoshop document and matching all the settings between the two print dialogs (and wouldn't you think they could STANDARDIZE that dialog box?).  Ooh, here it comes, let's check... NO!  The red box is still printing as yellow.  GRRR.

I wish I could just call some knight to come in and fix all the settings for me.  But the thought of an extended dialog with someone on the other side of the world who assumes I am completely clueless and answers questions I wasn't asking in the first place is just not all that appealing.  The truth is, I just have to keep fiddling -- and using up this expensive paper -- until I can get it to work.  Which is not how I wanted to spend my time today -- I'm doing this project as a favor for a friend, you know the kind, "Oh, just take a couple of pictures and run it off again, no problem."

It's a great lesson I seem to have forgotten somewhere along the way: learn to say NO!  But it's also frustrating that something that printed beautifully on my old computer 2 years ago is such a disaster on my new one.  And at some point I WILL need to solve this problem.  I just kind of didn't want to deal with it NOW.

So -- as my husband would say -- What did you learn from this?

I think maybe I thought _I_ was the knight on the white horse.  Maybe it's just time to put me out to pasture?  Nope.  I think I just need to pull an Einstein: take a break, take a nap, come back fresh and the solution will be obvious -- I've just put in too many hours today; I'm forgetting to stop and breathe.

How about you?  Did you stop and breathe today?

1 comment:

Maureen said...

I'm stopping now by visiting you here. We've been up since 2:30 this morning dealing with water coming in on one side of the house. We have a temp fix in place and I live for the hour the hard rain stops and I see sunshine again. Lot of expense ahead. Still, we're not on the Potomac, like the City of Alexandria, which is flooding today. So, I'm breathing.

Good luck with the colors. How frustrating that must be.