Ok, now for the lone entry for the week that doesn't have to do with Hawaii.
I've never really frequented OfficeMax [officemax.com] very much. Despite the fact that there is one about a mile away from my house, I've never had much occasion to use it. I order most of my supplies and computer related equipment off the web.
Recently, I needed to print a rather large document. And many of the pages in the document had high-resolution pictures. This was not the type of job that I was going to be able accomplish myself. My options were either to use one of the OfficeMaxes, or drive downtown to a Kinko's (could not find an appropriate site to link to).
I decided to try OfficeMax. The OfficeMax that I went to (since it was closest to my house) was located at:
21950 Center Ridge Road
Rocky River, OH 44116
My document was 172 pages long, and was about 5 MB. Since the file size was relatively small, I decided to burn it to a mini-CD that I had lying around, instead of wasting a full-sized CD. I also posted the document to the web, in case they had a slot loading optical drive (that can't read off mini-CDs).
The first thing that happens when I get there is they tell me they can't read off a mini-CD because the only computer they can use for print jobs has a slot-loading drive (as opposed to a tray-loading optical drive). I told them that wasn't a problem, and I could tell them where to download the document off the web.
It was then that they told me that they were not allowed to download any documents off the web. That has to be the most stupid policy I've ever heard. Are they worried about copyright infringement? It seems like it would be obvious whether any copyrights are going to be violated or not when the document is downloaded (particularly if the beginning of the document has a copyright notification).
Are they worried about viruses? Then instruct your employees to stop using Internet Exploder? This is a terrible policy. They recommended that I email the document to them along with my phone number and address, wait until I get a call from them acknowledging that they had received the document and they could open it, and then come back to the store with the special paper I wanted the document printed on. They warned me, however, that their email servers are slow, and that sometimes it takes a few hours for large attachments to go through.
Instead, I went home and burned the file (a PDF) to a normal-sized CD, then took the CD to another computer and opened up the document to make sure the file burned correctly, and went back to the store so I could have it printed immediately.
When I got back to the store, they had trouble opening up the file, and said that the problem was probably that the file was corrupt. I insisted that I opened up the file without problems on another computer. They then told me that since the file was 5MB and was "relatively large", sometimes it takes a while for files like that to load. I'm sorry, but 5MB, isn't that large.
Finally, they got the file to open properly, and were able to print my document with no further problems. Needless to say, I was very annoyed at what should have been a very simple procedure. I guess that hiring competent people is just too expensive these days.
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