Rainbow Gravure

You’ll find us over at Shed No B3 on Canal South Road. It’s an industrial area, so it’s not exactly a place for a Sunday stroll. The shed is big enough for our machines, which is what we need. We work on gravure printing. It’s a lot of metal cylinders and heavy ink. The air inside can get a bit heavy with the smell of chemicals, but we keep the big doors open when the weather is okay. It gets pretty hot in the summer under the corrugated roof. We have some fans, but they mostly just move the warm air around. Still, we get the work done. There are a few of us here who have been doing this for years. We know the machines well, even the parts that tend to act up when it gets humid. We deal with a lot of long runs of printing, things that take hours and hours to finish. It’s a lot of watching the rolls spin and making sure the color stays even. We don't have a fancy office or a place to sit and have meetings. Usually, we just stand around the machines or sit on some crates when we take a break. It’s a practical setup. We aren't here to look pretty; we’re here to get the printing through the presses and onto the trucks. That’s the long and short of it.