A listener in St. Cloud, Minnesota, reports that when she first started in the printing business, new employees would be hazed with the prank assignment of finding a “paper stretcher” to make a web — the big sheet of paper that newspapers are printed on — a little larger. There is, of course, no such thing, and sending someone to find one is just one of many ways to tease newbies. Also, strippers in the newspaper business are much tamer than the common stripper — it’s just a term for those who prep images and copy for the printing plates. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Paper Stretchers”
We often ask for your workplace jargon, and we heard from Pam Carlin, who lives in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and she’s been regaling me back and forth in email with language from the old days of working in printing. You know those scenes in movies when they are printing up the Sunday newspapers, and they’re going by really, really fast, and the paper is threaded between rollers. Those rolls of papers are called webs. The roll of paper is called the web, and these are web presses. And the webs come in various sizes depending on the size of the publication to be printed. You’re going to have a different size web, whether it’s a newspaper or a magazine or coupon insert.
So Pam worked in printing, and she said one of her first assignments was to go to one of the other offices and ask if they would turn one of these 34-inch webs, that is a big roll of paper, into a 35-inch web by using a paper stretcher. She got pranked. She got pranked. She got punked the first day on the job. It’s like what the older workers do to harass the newbies. Welcome to the newbie. Everybody gets jumped into the gang one way or the other. Yeah, send them off for a can of striped paint.
So anyway, she got sent off for a paper stretcher, and now she thinks that’s hilarious. But another word from those days before desktop publishing is the word stripper. That’s the person who prepared film images and copy for the printing plates. And Pam writes, I was a stripper and met my husband at work. He was also a stripper. So when people would ask Pam where she and her husband met, they would say, well, we were strippers. We were both strippers.
I was in the newspaper business at the tail end of the print era like that. And the presses were still a thing. Yeah, with giant, giant presses as long as a city block. Yeah, thundering, right? Wonderful smells. And you’d never leave there without your clothes getting ink on them or stain somehow or cut somehow. Were you a stripper? No, but I knew the strippers. Yeah, they were nice guys. All union come in there, and they were fast, super fast. They could put your film where it needed to be in no time at all.
We love hearing your workplace jargon. You can send it to us at words@waywordradio.org, and we have a very active group on Facebook.
