I'm ALMOST a hundred percent certain that there is nothing to worry about. But that tiny little one percent of doubt is the loudest minority in my head at the moment. Besides, even if there is no case gainst us (most likely), we might have to send Ex Boss a strongly-worded legal-type letter "suggesting" that he stops telling all his customers and suppliers that he wants to take Daniel to court, unless he actually intends to do it. Otherwise it's nothing but slander, giving people in the industry cause to believe that Daniel has done something wrong when he hasn't.

What scares me is that if he gets backed any further into his dark little corner, there is no knowing what Ex Boss might do. I don't know if a warning letter from a solicitor would be enough to stop him from doing what he's doing, or whether it will just make him more bitter than he already is. I suspect the latter. And a bitter, greedy businessman can be dangerous.

So naturally, with all these potential consequences in my head, I was feeling a bit like crap this morning, and Daniel still hadn't called me to say what had happened.

11am. Ring, ring.

"Hello, Pigeon's Printing, Daniel speaking."
"Oh. You are there."
"yes..."
"Well, how did it all go?"
"Um, Tania wasn't there."
"What? After you had specifically arranged to-"
(Sensing a self-righteous rant coming on) "She was home-invaded over the weekend. The police were at her place taking fingerprints this morning. We've arranged to meet on Thursday instead."
"But I've been feeling like crap all morning!"
"Sorry."

Yes. There was no meeting today.

Now I get to go through it all again on Thursday.

Because my computer at work was all exploded from last week, I didn't come in yesterday. This was at my manager's suggestion, because I can't do anything without that computer.

Instead, I went to The Business with Daniel, where we had to get these enormous signs mounted, trimmed and packed by 1pm. It is an interesting thing, having to develop techniques to produce things that we've never made before. The finished products looked really good but we both agreed that they could be better (we have high standards), so we've come up with some ideas of what to do differently next time.

Things that went wrong this time:

1) Tried mounting the sign in a new and different way that was supposed to make things easy. Instead, the print stuck to something it wasn't supposed to stick to, and the more we tried to fix it, the worse it got. In the end it had to be reprinted because we pretty much ripped it to shreds. Oops.

2) With the best of intentions, we decided to clean the (very, VERY plastic-and-polystyrene constructed) board onto which the prints were supposed to be mounted. There was some sticky crap on it so we tried to remove it with metho, but that didn't do much, so Daniel said, "time to break out the tough stuff. Pass the Citro Clean."

Here's a tip: always check the label to see if it says anything like, "you might want to try this on an inconspicuous area if you're intending to use it on plastic, as this product DISSOLVES POLYSTYRENE". (It didn't quite say that, but it did make mention of the "inconspicuous area", especially for plastics.)

The sticky stuff just wasn't coming off - it was kind of smearing everywhere and just getting worse. So we sprayed more Citro-Clean on it and scrubbed harder. Eventually we came to realise that the sticky stuff was long gone but the cleaning product was actually partially dissolving the plastic, and as we scrubbed we were in fact damaging the surface of the plastic and our cloth-marks were being embedded in it for posterity. Even where we'd sprayed the stuff, each splash-mark became a tiny pock in the surface.

Luckily you could barely notice it once the print was mounted on it. But BOY does that Citro stuff eat through polystyrene.

3) Everything was almost done, signs were looking great and all we had to do was add some edging to cover the polystyrene on the sides. Then suddenly I noticed that two letters on one of the words were missing. "Find" had become "(blanky blank)nd". I couldn't believe we hadn't seen it earlier.

Fortunately this wasn't as much of a disaster as it could have been. We just plotted a couple of replacement letters onto white vinyl and stuck them on. You can barely tell... as long as you're not specifically looking for it with your nose pressed to the board.

However, this gives us yet ANOTHER lesson: always read EVERYTHING on the sign before you mount it. Preferably before you print it.

It's just such a pain that things go wrong so often, and they're always such random things. Plus this job is for a very big customer so it's kind of important that we get it right.

Anyway, I'm back at work today so I should go. I am supposed to be attempting to do some "sales work" by calling customers that we haven't heard from in several years and saying, "hi, um, you probably don't know me but are you still interested in buying mudflaps from us?"

It is going to be a LONG afternoon.

PS Hey, wow. I just realised that my template is complete pants with Firefox. Guess I should take a look at my template.