For many years, when I worked for Diamond, I worked on the UK edition of PREVIEWS.
The UK team had a small section — it usually ran 16 pages, though some months it ran 24 or even, once or twice, 32 — of items unique to the UK. For the first several years I was there, this was done by Kevin, and when Kevin “deserted [us] for a wife” (to borrow Sherlock Holmes’ line from “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier) I picked up doing the section. It wasn’t automated like other PREVIEWS sections. It existed outside of our databases, and the data came over piecemeal as each of the buyers in the UK office had their own working style. I always enjoyed working on the UK Supplement. I tried to write it in British English, and I let myself play with the text more. Eventually I got it into a system with spreadsheets and macros, and that helped with the production of PREVIEWS #400, the ransomware issue, as the tools I built for the UK Supplement, with some adjustments, helped me to develop the tools we used to write and layout that issue.
The UK Supplement was tacked onto the end of the catalog, and a special print run of a couple hundred copies was made then shipped to the UK. The UK edition of the catalog was the one we received in the home office. There were a few, rare months when we didn’t get a UK copy, but I’d say 98% of my 220 issue run was of the UK edition of PREVIEWS.
As the order form coordinator, I also made and oversaw the production of the UK order form. For a while this was printed at a copy shop somewhere near Plattsburgh on 11″ x 17″ paper, double sided, folded, and stapled before being shipped to the UK. Later, for reasons of cost, we went to making only a PDF.
There was also a UK Star Order Form, which was a listing of in-stock product in the Diamond UK warehouse. This was not printed. This was always a PDF.
One order form cycle, sometime in late 2020, when almost everyone at Diamond was working remote, except for some weirdos (like me) who worked hybrid, we were working on one of the UK Star Order Form. Something occurred to me that had not occurred to me in the previous dozen years — what was our page size?
I looked at the PDF the graphic designer had sent me. 8 1/2 by 11. That’s not what the UK uses. They use A4 paper.
(Once upon a time, I had this mad idea that I was going to use A4 paper because it would be cool. Do you know how hard it is to find A4 paper in the United States? Well, I could order it online, but it was also freakin’ expensive. Thus died my mad idea of being cool.)
I emailed the designer. “Hey, this just came to me. How hard would it be to rework this for the A4 page size? The UK doesn’t use letter-size paper. They need an A4 PDF.”
It wasn’t difficult at all! I was told. Sure enough, the order form was redone in A4, and it looked like it had always been that way.
The head of the Graphics department was copied in on this conversation, and she lost her damn mind. She didn’t understand. It had never been done this way. No one over there had asked for this. No one had ever complained. If steam could come out of my monitor while reading email, the wrinkles in my shirts would have vanished.
I understood this to an extent. I had suddenly questioned the doing of a thing that had been done for many years at that point and pointed out how we had been doing it wrong all along. But now that it was noticed, I wanted to do it right.
I approved the new A4 UK Star order form, told the designer to save the template for the new A4 size as that’s what we would use going forward, and we would need to rework the PREVIEWS UK order form templates, as that order form was now a PDF, into the A4 size for going forward. (This involved many more templates — cover page, two pages of ordered information, the order form key, support pages, and the listings pages.)
I guess the head of Graphics got over it. I wasn’t trying to “show her up.” I had the thought that maybe she hadn’t known that the UK uses A4 paper, not letter. Because why would she need to know that? Why would I need to know that? Besides being famously weird, of course.
No harm done. Until the end, UK order form materials were done at A4 sizes. I never told the UK team that I can recall. I hope they noticed. I was looking out for them and their customers.