I’m a fairly reasonable guy and I expect any reasonable-sized business to know what they are doing when they offer a service.
Today I sent a couple of documents through their website for them to print and I’d pick them up later. Here’s how the story goes:
Attempt #1
I upload 3 documents. 1 x 1page, 2 x 2 pages.I then submit the job for 20 copies of each. Their process of ‘uploading a file’ is called ‘creating a document’. Pretty confusing when I have a document already. They should call it as it is, a print JOB. Calling the uploading of 3 documents ‘a document’ make zero sense but whatever floats your boat you awfully brainy corporate types.
After submitting the ‘document’ I noticed that the total pages count was rather high. I go and check my uploads and through some miracle of modern mayhem, one of my 2-page ‘files’ is suddenly 3 pages long?! What the….. Sigh, so I quickly call up to cancel the print job and try again.
Attempt #2
This time I decide to use strictly PDFs. They are pretty universally accepted and their formatting is fixed. This time the page count is right. I head over and pick up my job in a couple of hours expecting a completely professional print job waiting for me. Next is where I made mistake # 2 (and haven’t told you what the first supposed mistake #1 was made but we’ll get to that later). I get my print job, organize the papers (actually a 2-page resume and cover letter) and proceed off to my target places where I’ll be dropping them off. After I drop off the second one I realize that there is a mistake in it! Great! I thought I spelled something or some other bonehead move. Nope, we are fortunate enough to pin this one on Staples yet again! For some, inexplicable reason, Staples process added a tab to my bullet points, throwing off a whole whack of formatting and makes the resume look like crap!
So back to the freaking store I go ready to bitch and simply get all my money back. The chick behind the counter says ‘there’s a proof image that you get to look at before you finally submit your job’ and triumphantly places the blame back on me! (it’s a small little link that says ‘view pdf’. Why would I need to do that, I made it!) I said “Staples should not be messing with my formatting!” to whit she replies “If you uploaded a Word Doc, sometimes the formatting is different from computer to computer.” (I should have let her read my Resume….) “I uploaded a PDF.” I retort. She tries the “PDF formatting doesn’t get changed.”
Now, here is my crowning moment of triumph. “Let me show you the original document.” I whip out my HTC Dream, Secure-FTP back to my machine sitting on my desk at home, download the PDF, then open it up and show her the original formatting.
She doesn’t want to cave in and keep the blame on me but says “We can reprint it for you but we’ll only charge you half-price.” (which totals to $1.50). I am loathe to allow this to go as I want to get a proper copy back to at least one of the places I dropped off the screwed up on before it’s too late, so I agree. As they didn’t have a MicroSD card reader they let me plug my Dream into their machine and I copy the resume to their desktop. We open it up, looks good and they do a print right there.
What a pain in the ass. See what you get for procrastinating in getting a replacement drum cartridge for your laser printer? Sheesh.
