Yesterday was awesome, especially in contrast to all the stupid emo crap I spouted a couple days ago.

I got up bright and early and drove to Ann Arbor in a thunderstorm to arrive at Malloy Inc, my new printers.

I walked in the front door and there was one of those little name-board thingies with the white plastic letters on ’em. I did a double-take, because it said:

Blush. What an awesome way to start your day! Even better, my Account Exec only drives in one day a week and she changed up her schedule so that she’d be in to meet me, and I also got to meet my CSR — it was good to finally put faces to the names of the people I’d been working with. So I get the hard proofs and I go into their conference room to go over them.

A couple hours later I finished the proofs, and then they took me out to lunch — a really nice new place on Jackson road with great atmosphere and fantastic food. I know this seems like little stuff when I type it out, but dude, If y’all knew how much I’ve been through trying to get these books printed, it was literally like crawling out of the desert and into an oasis.

An oasis where they served really good club sandwiches.

So then we went back to the plant and went over the changes together, and I got a full tour of the plant. Wow! Now, those of you who know me understand what a huge nerd I am for cool machinery, how-to sessions, and books — so the tour was a total geekout for me. If only I’d had my camera! Why didn’t I bring my camera?!

I got to see everything: collators both small and large, the hot-glue perfect-binding machine, the huge 1 or 2-color Timson presses with these cool holey spindles that shoot a buffer of air out of them so the paper never actually touches the spindle and another neato thingie that hypodermically injects just a little bit of water into the fold of the signatures so they’ll crease more easily, and the rows of 4-color Heidelberg presses, thermal plate-printing machines, the trimming machine with the built-in hood that sucks up all the loose trimmed paper (complete with b/w Suction Cam, I kid you not) and the table where they cut the heavy covers down to size where the surface of the table is all covered with these little gasketed beebees and when the heavy cover blocks depress the beebees a jet of air shoots out of the gasket, thereby essentially hovercrafting the coverstock around so that it doesn’t get scratched, and the casebinding machine and the machine that crimps and folds the dustjackets and and and and I got to fish around in the waste bins for hardcover books yay. Squeeeeeeeeee! It was nerd heaven.

And then I went home and fixed the changes and sent them over by FTP.

So I don’t have the books yet, but it’s looking like they’ll ship very, very soon. I was going to hesitate and not put up any information on Malloy until I received the books and was okay with them, especially given the run of luck I’ve had recently, but the experience I had was just too much fun, and far too positive not to recount. I really feel like the guys at Malloy have their heads on straight, and my reps seemed really super knowledgeable (not to mention really kind to me), and the company seemed really well- and tightly-run. Best of all, I really felt like they were devoting their total attention to me, and that I wasn’t just some flyspeck small-presser who they could blow off, or were too busy to deal with. I really felt special there, and that is really, truly, exactly what I need right now.

So yeah. I can’t yet vouch for the product because I don’t have it yet, but I can give their customer service a pretty big thumbs-up at this point, at least for the “courtship stage” of our relationship. All signs point to yes!

Woo!