Prelude to 'Zine documentation

Whew. Whatta day. It was one of those days that never goes exactly as planned.
I left my cell phone at work on Sunday so I was flying blind and hoping he'd remember and be there when I set out for the train to my friend Atom's house in order to shoot photos for the Lulu book.
He wasn't there.
But he did show up, about twenty minutes later. So I did end up getting the photos.

I then took the train back down to my neighborhood and headed over to the Kinkos to get my 'zine printed up. It was the worst experience I've ever had at Kinkos. And for anyone who's ever had any experience at all with Kinkos, you know that's saying a lot. Their laptop stations were down, my flash drive was formatted for Mac and wouldn't work on any of their self-service PCs. I knew this because I'd tried it before, and yet the "helpers" there made me go from computer to computer (paying for the computer usage each time) to prove to them that it wouldn't work. It was strange. Then, they wouldn't print the files from my drive through their computers (which I've had them do before) because they can only help customers with "large format printing" or emailed jobs with a 24-hour turn-around.
So I left and headed downtown to school. I put cash on my artic card for the color printer and got everything printed out. But since the B&W printers don't do copies and I didn't want to pay .89 per page on the color copier, I headed out again and went to Kinkos on Jackson.
And then Kinkos got another big Fuck You from me as I went to create a booklet and discovered that Kinkos disables that option on their copiers. It's there. It pops up. But they've twerked their systems to not actually allow it. The guy who worked there couldn't even override it.
So I had to place two 8.5x11 pages in the correct order on the copier, make my 11x17s, then feed that through to make 2-sided prints. Not a big deal, just not as easy as the booklet making tool. Plus it wasted 8 sheets of paper.
After I got the interiors done, I went to do the color covers on the copier. I had decided that the centerfold of each one would also be a large poster of one of the cover illustrations also in full color, so I'd left my central splash page open to feed through the color copier as well. Then I discovered that Kinkos has raised their color copy price to 1.89 for 11x17 (which makes no sense next to the .49 for 8.5x11 - the price more than triples?) so I ended up doing the covers in color and the central splash in B&W.
I then decided to go ahead and use their radial cutter to trim the edges/margins off each of my print outs. It was dull, loose, and broken in parts. It wasn't smooth going at all, but it did a fair enough job. And I kind of enjoy the inconsistencies and jagged edges.

Then I noticed a typo.


Then, when I finally made it home (to my first meal of the day at 8pm) I got a letter in the mail informing me to report for Jury Duty on August 14th.

Good times. Heh.


This really was not intended to be a whoa is me post. More of a giant middle finger to Kinkos. And a reminder to myself that as appealing as their open 24 hour flourescent cube may be, it's really not worth the headache.