Round Four: Printing

Those not of the academic lifestyle might not realize how much printing and copying your typical academic does. Some of this is exaggerated in my case: I run through multiple drafts of everything (though as a snarky email from my DGS reminded me recently, I'm still a crappy proofreader), and so I tend to do a lot of printing I didn't even realize how much, though, until we moved from Princeton, land of plentiful and free printers--oh, the nights jogging a few doors down through blizzards to get to the cluster computers--to a place without.

Suddenly cursing my generosity in giving away my old printer ("I haven't used this in 3 years!" says I, "Why don't you take it, Nick?"), E and I were forced to find a Chicago printing option. Now, I can print in at school, and that's fine if I plan ahead. But some days--say, this past saturday--I just want a copy of something I'm working on to have a virtuous weekend. That's where Kinkos comes in.

E had used Kinkos often before we left to bind her intimidatingly large sourcebooks, but my experience was more limited. Aside from printing out a conference poster at the one in Eugene, I had never really had much use for them. Which is not to say that they didn't have some sort of weird mythos attached to them. In some point around the mid-90s, the highschool version of me became convinced that Kinkos was where cool people hung out.
Like a lot of things (Starbucks), not actually having one in Frederick helped make it seem a lot cooler than it actually was. I honestly can't remember why I thought Kinkos was so full of indie cred---some sort of nth-generation Gen-X stereotype passed through a Telephone-style series of links before it got to me, I think. But yeah, Kinkos was where people hung out, everyone either xeroxing their indie-rock riot-grrrrl 'zines or working to save up enough money to xerox their own zines, or star in "Reality Bites II: European Road Trip" or whatever. So yeah, this Kinkos at least... ummm... has some guys with piercings and stuff? Or at least the guy in the picture; while he wasn't the one who helped me, he was happy to glare sullenly while I snapped pictures in a very un-sneaky way.


Anyhow, that's all by way of apology for a post entirely about Kinkos. The redeeming feature of the Kinkos in my part of town is that they're happy to print stuff for me for the cheap behind-the-counter price instead of the criminal DIY-for-49-cents-a-page price. E claims that this is a general feature of Kinkos. However, I tried to ask for it once at a Kinkos down in the loop, and they gave me a look like I'd offered to poop on their chests, so I think they're actually just nicer folks up here on the north side. Anyhow, the total price for "Of Minds and Metals", draft 11, is pretty low: a 25-page paper double-sided came out to $2.16. Beat that, China!