Caterwauling

OK, so after two days of driving around lost, I finally found Kinko’s at some plaza in Bailey’s Crossroads. Whee.

The problem? Forty fucking cents a minute is being sapped away as I hunt and click and sigh, only to find that they do not have Adobe Acrobat.

Duh, it’s a free program. Why the hell don’t they have it?

I have been procrastinating in doing some legal paperwork because I couldn’t print it out. I’ve also missed some opportunities to promote myself because I have two non-functioning printers in my living room/office.

So, I bought my own damn printer at Best Buy. Yay. Because it’s always wise to max out one’s last credit card when there is no foreseeable income on the horizon. For the past 25 minutes, I have been repeating to myself, “It is an investment. It is a tax write-off. It is a necessity. Damn it.”

Although, admittedly, I’ve said, “Damn it,” more than anything. 🙂

I’ve spent a lot of time in Kinko’s — between Oregon, Pittsburgh and D.C., I’m sure I’ve wasted enough minutes looking for applications they don’t have (or don’t have the latest version of and therefore I couldn’t open documents and had to run back and re-save them as earlier versions) to catch up on my past-due car payment. And please don’t expect assistance in there — especially when I am the idiot who is fine with plunking down the higher cost to sit at the Mac G4 or G5 — because the only answer you will get is, “Well, the server is online. I don’t know why you’re having problems.”

Oh, that’s another complaint (specific to the Oregon stores) — after you’ve run home and re-saved your document into a format the machine will understand, you pop it open and voila! The server is offline and won’t print. So you sit there till it comes online, because if you take your credit card out of the terminal, you won’t KNOW when the thing is back online.

Oh but wait, there’s more. I’ve been to the Old Town Alexandria location, and well, what a treat that was. I wanted to print, but when I hit print, the document went to the corporate site for processing. Great. So I had to ask where to send it and then I had to wait till it processed (I was printing from a disk — all edits were done at home and all I wanted to do was skim over the final product before logging off). Well, let me just say I had paid $2 up-front to use the machine. So, in addition to my wait time, I got a pop-up message every 15 seconds to remind me that my time was running out. All told, after I added more and more money to the pre-paid card, it was a $10 endeavor to print my four-sentence resignation letter.

Bah.

I also get kind of upset that, in many stores (Monroeville, Pa., *cough cough*), the cost to use the Mac is double the cost to use a PC. But, in my estimation, you couldn’t pay ME to use the PC, and frankly, I’m so quick on the Mac that I can do in 10 minutes ($4 for those playing at home) what I can do in 20 minutes on a PC.

Anyway.

I’m going to try to get over my concussion and finish setting up my new printer that I can’t afford. 🙂 It’s going under the desk, and I keep bonking my head off the keyboard shelf. But that’s nothing compared to the temptation I had at Kinko’s to hang myself with a mouse cord. …

On iTunes: Juice Newton, “Angel of the Morning”

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 21st, 2004 at 4:26 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.