I Hate Kinko's

Since Kroz just posted something about how miserable she was... let me add my story to hers.

The activity involved putting together 25 CARE packages, baking, and - my contribution - a booklet with assorted advice to graduating seniors, from our young adults group. So I spent the whole afternoon putting it together, and finally decided around 6:30pm that I wouldn't make the martial arts banquet. Bummer, since I really wanted to go...

But anyway, stayed and finished that. Joy and I went to Kinko's at about 9pm, because that was the only place we could get photocopies that late. I wanted to make it to OfficeMax, but they closed at 9pm... boo. We got there, and I was given the runaround. The guy behind the counter quoted me one price, gave me some completely fictitious prices (7c a copy? Since when did Kinko's offer 7c a copy?), then I noticed the sign said something else, confronted the other guy (he said it was 10c a copy).

So I began my photocopying. After one bit where I figured out that I had flipped two sides of one page of the booklet, we started photocopying... well, to make a long story short, I jammed the photocopier three times, and once, when I wasn't looking, it started photocopying in blue and cyan, and switched to cardstock, and then went back to white. What the random? (As JW would say.)

The guy told me he could credit my account. But he didn't tell me NOT to print a receipt, so I went to go print a receipt so that we could keep an accurate record. Well, guess what? Their software made it so that he couldn't post a refund. So, instead, he gave me a bunch of their 25 copy passes and said he wouldn't charge me for three of them. Great.

I then moved to a second copier, and started photocopying. Well, one thing I noticed is that when it finished with 25, it stopped photocopying - and would photocopy the last page as single-sided, if that's what it took. Frustrating. I then managed to jam the card inside the reader, where the copier said "insert card" and the card reader said "insert card," but no amount of pressing the button would allow me to get the card back, because, of course, it was already in the reader.

Now understand that I had been a big stress-ball all afternoon because I wanted to make the banquet, and then I wanted to make it to the copy center at OfficeMax before it closed, but I had to be patient and so was stuck with Kinko's. Then one must understand that these photocopiers are just like the ones that we have at school, and I know that if all things went well, I should not have had this problem, and we would have been out in about fifteen minutes.

It took us a whole hour to finish photocopying 200 double sided pages. ONE HOUR.

At the end, I was so frustrated and relieved that I screamed outside of Kinko's, just to get that cathartic experience of expressing my abject horror of the way we were treated, the cost, the completely idiotic experience, and me with no punching bag...