This past weekend I loaded up all of the master copies for the new publications, a zip drive, glue sticks, and a quarter ream of A4 paper and took the bus out to Kinkos to actually PRINT the first contributors' copies. All went well for awhile, as I whipped through the usual last-minute changes, numeration, and other chores that for reason's I shan't go into unless someone actually wants to know, are most easily done there. Time to print up the first batch of Synapse 4.
First photocopier: big gash across the glass.
Second machine: different, but similarly disfiguring scar across the flatbed.
Third machine: small specks tossed across the glass.
Fourth machine: beauti-no, no, it wrinkles every piece of 11x17 that it touches.
And that's it. Machine #3 it is.
The final master prints off pretty well; so far so good.
Then I discover that I'm being stranded in a blizzard.
It is announced that Kinkos, the 24-hour place, is closing in less than an hour. Fuck. So, rather than my usual laborious procedure of separately scanning and checking each sheet before I print the full batch, I scan all 14 double-sided sheets in at once, and hit PRINT, as I scramble for another control card to start printing the TLPs on machine #4, which can handle letter-size paper. It's then announced that they'll be closing even earlier and will shove me out into the snow when the employees' rides arrive.
The key thing to remember here is that if I am caught out in the snow for 45 minutes waiting for the bus, more than $100 worth of paper is likely to be ruined. Also my feet might fall off, as my shoes are full of holes.
So, Warren with his hearty little car heroically ventures out into the increasingly snowy New Jersey roadway system (Midwest drivers could have handled this snow, but this is Jersey, so everything's fucked from the get-go, it's an ontological principle). Meanwhile I have discovered that Machine #3 is mis-registered, and is shifting everything 1/8 inch up, so that I'm losing text at the top of the page. I frantically re-print the worst offenders whilst packing up the materials for the publications I no longer have time to print and verbally sparring with the anxious employees in order to prevent myself getting tossed out.
Then Warren gets a flat tire.
I throw the still-warm pages of Synapse into a box, finagle a plastic bag from the employees to buy the copies some time, and lunge out the door into the cold, plunging through the virgin snow, up and down the footbridge over Route 18, through some parking lots gaping like white deserts, over the islands of corporate gardens studding whitely from them, to the hotel lot where Warren is propping the perennially half-attached trunk open. The spare tire is literally frozen to the floor of the trunk. It will not budge. Like a fat rubber Excalibur.
So we drop the unassembled Synapses inside and trudge back to catch the bus back to New Brunswick after all.
The next day Warren retrieves his car and the box of Synapses returns. The following day I open it and begin to assemble it:
IT'S SHIT.
In addition to the mis-registration, good old Machine #3 printed everything at an inexplicably dark range, meaning that the images are flattened and obscured, the traces of the opposite side of each page are printed on the front, and columns of text close together have shadows added to them. It looks like a bad bootleg.
The moral of the story? Fuck Kinkos.
......aaaand, fuck snowstorms.
and even more their unholy progeny.
THE REASON YOU PAY $$ AT KINKOS IS BECAUSE THEY TAKE CARE OF THEIR MACHINES.
They ought to take care of their machines.
So now the first 15 copies/$80 of Synapse are down the drain. Good ones, and everything else, soon! I hope to be sending out around five packets of contributors' copies out a week starting after Christmas (and a number will be distributed in person before then, as I do a quick string of meetings-up with people in Ohio). Other things are simmering--more soon!
First photocopier: big gash across the glass.
Second machine: different, but similarly disfiguring scar across the flatbed.
Third machine: small specks tossed across the glass.
Fourth machine: beauti-no, no, it wrinkles every piece of 11x17 that it touches.
And that's it. Machine #3 it is.
The final master prints off pretty well; so far so good.
Then I discover that I'm being stranded in a blizzard.
It is announced that Kinkos, the 24-hour place, is closing in less than an hour. Fuck. So, rather than my usual laborious procedure of separately scanning and checking each sheet before I print the full batch, I scan all 14 double-sided sheets in at once, and hit PRINT, as I scramble for another control card to start printing the TLPs on machine #4, which can handle letter-size paper. It's then announced that they'll be closing even earlier and will shove me out into the snow when the employees' rides arrive.
The key thing to remember here is that if I am caught out in the snow for 45 minutes waiting for the bus, more than $100 worth of paper is likely to be ruined. Also my feet might fall off, as my shoes are full of holes.
So, Warren with his hearty little car heroically ventures out into the increasingly snowy New Jersey roadway system (Midwest drivers could have handled this snow, but this is Jersey, so everything's fucked from the get-go, it's an ontological principle). Meanwhile I have discovered that Machine #3 is mis-registered, and is shifting everything 1/8 inch up, so that I'm losing text at the top of the page. I frantically re-print the worst offenders whilst packing up the materials for the publications I no longer have time to print and verbally sparring with the anxious employees in order to prevent myself getting tossed out.
Then Warren gets a flat tire.
I throw the still-warm pages of Synapse into a box, finagle a plastic bag from the employees to buy the copies some time, and lunge out the door into the cold, plunging through the virgin snow, up and down the footbridge over Route 18, through some parking lots gaping like white deserts, over the islands of corporate gardens studding whitely from them, to the hotel lot where Warren is propping the perennially half-attached trunk open. The spare tire is literally frozen to the floor of the trunk. It will not budge. Like a fat rubber Excalibur.
So we drop the unassembled Synapses inside and trudge back to catch the bus back to New Brunswick after all.
The next day Warren retrieves his car and the box of Synapses returns. The following day I open it and begin to assemble it:
IT'S SHIT.
In addition to the mis-registration, good old Machine #3 printed everything at an inexplicably dark range, meaning that the images are flattened and obscured, the traces of the opposite side of each page are printed on the front, and columns of text close together have shadows added to them. It looks like a bad bootleg.
The moral of the story? Fuck Kinkos.
......aaaand, fuck snowstorms.
and even more their unholy progeny.
THE REASON YOU PAY $$ AT KINKOS IS BECAUSE THEY TAKE CARE OF THEIR MACHINES.
They ought to take care of their machines.
So now the first 15 copies/$80 of Synapse are down the drain. Good ones, and everything else, soon! I hope to be sending out around five packets of contributors' copies out a week starting after Christmas (and a number will be distributed in person before then, as I do a quick string of meetings-up with people in Ohio). Other things are simmering--more soon!
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