Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Try to Get Your Mind Around This One

The big honchos, the biggest honcho in fact, are coming in from Germany and will be in New York for the rest of the week. I had a bunch of PowerPoint presentations they sent me and asked me to have them printed. So I walked to the Kinko's two blocks down. It was rather small. "Do you make color copies?" I asked.

"No, we only do black and white here. For color copies you need to go to the Kinko's across the street."

"Across the street?" I looked out the window and sure enough, there was another Kinko's directly across the street. I looked at the sign where I was. "Kinkos/FedEx Express". (Let's not even get into the wisdom behind FedEx Express). I looked at the sign across the street. "Kinkos/FedEx Express". Okay.

So I walked across the street and entered the second Kinkos. And thus began my stay in the purgatory that is Kinko's Hell.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hate Kinkos! I cannot tell you hoe many times I have walked to the three different Kinkos in the vicinity of my office to be told in the end that I can do it myself with a handy card. Bitches!

Anonymous said...

I think I mean "how many times".

Anonymous said...

Screw Kinkos - get yourself a good duplicating company and have them pick up the stuff and drop right back to you. I have plenty of good ones to recommend to you.

Beta said...

I have used at least 3 different branches for both work-related and personal jobs. My experiences there almost led me to set up a kinkos-venting-blog. I would never run out of material. They messed up (but finally fixed in the end) our wedding invitations, calendars that I gave them in pdf format, a mousepad that never made it to the destination and had to be reordered, and don't get me started on the times I've emailed them my job (because they said it was so practical and convenient) only to find out that it sat in their inbox and never got processed until I showed up days later to pick up the [unfinished] job.

MCMCMCLY said...

Reminds me of the Lewis Black bit about the Starbucks across from the Starbucks. According to him, they do it to capture the "senile" market who will walk out of Kinkos/Starbucks, immediately forget they were just in one, see it across the street and decide to go to Kinkos/Starbucks.

Cupcake said...

Thanks guys, because of your comments that showed me that Kinkos Hell is a pandemic, I felt totally justified in being a bitch when I went to pick up my order yesterday afternoon (order was not ready on time). I think starting a blog where people could share their Kinko's horror stories is a great idea. But first I would inform Kinko's HQ that you are going for it. Who knows what they'll offer you to clam up?

Fortunately, I've been at this job for over a year and this is the first time I've had to use them.