Life of Wry

Ran into a mom and dad turkey and their eight kiddo turkeys down at the creek yesterday. I’d not seen turkeys down there before…  herons, egrets, all manner of ducks, yes, but turkeys are a new one on me. They were a nice family.

That’s all I was going to say, but then I realized I actually have a turkey story…..

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I came home this afternoon from a trip to FEDexKinkos, or whatever they call that now, and marched right into Jim’s office to report on the turkeys I dealt with there today. I’m still annoyed by this. (Jim, this is your cue to stop reading as you’ve heard this story more than once and had to listen to me kvetch enough already!)

So…. I made an announcement that I am planning to send to family about Peter’s graduation. It’s an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet, folded in half, with text, photos and graphics on all four sides. Its cover is an arrangement of these three images:

I take my thumb drive to the order desk with my prototype announcement and begin to describe what I need.. and the guy gets all furrowed, slowly shakes his head and says, “I can’t reproduce that.” We go back and forth about the whys and wherefores (quite a bit because I’m dubious about his rationale and more than a little annoyed… polite, but annoyed).  He says he has a blanket permission to reproduce the large one, and can reproduce the physics one because “that’s just words,” but he can’t reproduce that little Revelle insignia because it’s copyrighted and he doesn’t have the rights on it. He makes comparisons to Disney logos as an example and says FEDexKinkos is under strict rules to adhere to copyright. Nothing he can do.

I say: Dude, (I don’t actually call him dude), this is a hokey, homemade graduation announcement going to 40 family members, no money is being made, Revelle College is a subset of UCSD for which you DO have permission. You can’t be serious. (He’s serious.)

I should have asked for a second opinion (wish I’d thought of that in the moment), but instead I left, went home, made another version of the announcement without the Revelle logo, copied it to my thumb drive, deleted the old one, and returned 20 minutes later. He was gone. The woman I dealt with said that it should not have been an issue and that she would have made the copies (though she understood, sorta, his reluctance). (And I wished I hadn’t deleted the old version!)

I now have 40 less perfect announcements… but they’re still pretty nice… they do the job. I’m letting the whole thing go, but still holding on to just a little bit of my irkedness.

So.. turkeys = today’s theme.

Here are a couple tricked out (Prisma) versions of the above turkey photo, for fun.