All in a day ...

Every so often, the phone rings, and today it rang quite a few times. A frequent question is what are you doing? Often in a roundabout way, normally to ask if we can squeeze in an urgent job. Today’s urgent tasks are slide scanning for a professional photographer, photo print scanning for a last minute photo album plus a couple of video surveillance tapes for a legal firm in York.
In between gaps in the calls it was heads down to get through a normal days work - today the focus was on two major jobs. The first is a slide scanning project, just over 1,000 slides for a family archive. It’s turning out to be a fiddly job. Most people who shot slides used the same film, in the same camera, with a pretty reliable exposure system. Kodachrome dominates too. This job is different, the photographer has chopped and changed from one film to another and he’s been tough in sifting out substandard slides. So you scan 5,10 or 15 slides, then adjust the set up and off you go with the next set. Still, the variation makes life interesting.
The second job is less demanding, scanning photos is intrinsically easier. They’re all just photos and they chug through our scanner quite happily. This job has a single challenge - volume. This afternoon we crossed the 8,000 mark completing the seventh of eight boxes. So far the results look good and I’m hopeful that we’ll finish this part of the project early Thursday or maybe even late Wednesday. Then we’re into the final leg which is reducing the 300+ folders the images have been scanned into. The aim is to get them all into folders for the various trips and family events specified by the client. We’ve been given a master list of around 75 master folders. Although that sounds like a major task in itself it shouldn’t take too long.
So tomorrow it will be full steam ahead from first thing in the morning until about 11:00 when the postman arrives. Then we’ll break off and hit the urgent jobs that we’ve been promised were mailed today. That will keep us busy until mid afternoon when its back to our two major tasks.
Just a normal day in the office.