The deadline's over, the printer has done his job (pretty well again, I think) and we can have a little let-up in stress again. In Dutch we have an expression that says that something was a 'difficult labor' (as in giving birth - maybe someone can enlighten me whether this exists in English too). It rather was.

There was no problem with the authors, nor with the artists - well, Igor was a little late, but this was probably the most complex composition he's ever done, I'm sure you'll forgive him - no, this time we had computer problems.

As I explained earlier, when all the articles are laid out and proofread, I take myself and a binder full of prints to the office of MeSa design. On her 'purdy' Apple iMac (it's really hardly necessary anymore, but designers still seem to work on Apples), Sandra will have a file with the entire magazine all laid out. We then go through it page by page and correct whatever needs to be corrected. Typos, awkward sentences, as you'd expect, but in many cases the illustrations need to be switched out - drafts for final versions - or captions need to be put in the right place.

So we were doing all this, nicely on time, on a Friday night and when I went home at about 11.30 PM, it was almost completely ready to go. We needed one or two more things and I signalled to our printer that he could expect the final high-resolution PDF on Tuesday.

That is, until I got an SMS message from Sandra on Monday evening: "There are some problems with AW. Please call back asap." I was in the car, so couldn't call her back immediately (in the Netherlands calling on your cellphone without a hands-free set gets you a 200 euro fine!), but figured that hey, problems happen. Probably an ad that wasn't right or something some such.

Errr, no. The overall file had become corrupted in one way or another and was unusable. -> insert curses here <- Luckily Sandra still had a backup of the day before, so all that was missing were the corrections we'd made earlier. Nothing to be done but call the printer again, postpone a few days and schedule a new evening of corrections. Fortunately, I hadn't thrown my paper corrections out yet (pfew!). And, having done it before, doing the corrections a second time made them speedier. Fortunate - again - was especially that the printer could reschedule us without too much delay. The result now lies on our shelves and is at the distributor for labelling and packaging. And it looks good, so the hassle was worth it.

One final note for subscribers: we have improved our labelling both in size and information. If you want to know when your subscription expires, take a look at the bottom line on the label. From this issue on it will note the last issue of your subscription. Remember: renewals from our website can be bought at any time, they are automatically added to the back of your existing subscription.