#76 - Dear Kinko's

Dear Kinko's

12/16/05 (#76)

When I first moved to Portland, I suffered a rather inglorious arrival: the sum of my possessions in a rented royal-blue GMC Safari, the GMC Safari strapped to a flatbed tow truck. The rental, brand new with only a few hundred miles on it when I got it, had broken down twice on my drive out: once in the desert of Wyoming, the second time in the desert of Oregon. While I had traversed the nation daydreaming of driving into the city that would be home, after two breakdowns and their accompanying delays, I didn't mind spending the last couple of hours in the passenger seat of a rescue vehicle. By then, I just wanted to arrive. Period.

On the drive here from eastern Oregon, I was able to ask a lot of questions about Portland from my tow driver Larry, a Portland native and a genuine character. (In fact, I wowed my new roommates for weeks with my uncanny knowledge of knowledge of the city, all learned from Larry.) During our conversation, he asked where I would be living. I told him Northwest, knowing nothing more about the area than the fact that my future wife lived there. He gave a little grunt before drawling, "Northwest...that's where a lot of those....poet types live." I wasn't sure if poet was a code word, but the tone pointed to yes. Of course, if given the choice to live where the poet types live, or where the people who use the phrase "poet types" reside, I'll opt for the poets every time.

Turns out he right---at least literally. There were definitely an inordinate number of creatives in that area, especially if you took your census at the Kinko's on NW 23rd and Lovejoy.

Kinko's was a DIY headquarters. On any given night, from 7 pm until early morning, the photocopiers were crowded with zine makers, musicians, artists, nerds, and poet types. It wasn't a party---most folks kept to themselves, meticulously dabbing white-out on flyers and folding J-cards with an efficiency that Henry Ford would have admired---but it felt vibrant, an undercurrent of artistic freedom and soon-to-be-recognized potential.

The store itself was a phenomenon to me. In Maine, in 1994, there was no such thing as a 24-hour copy shop. (At 3 AM in Bangor, you had your choice of a 7-11, the hospital, and the police station-or going home and getting some sleep "like normal people do.") In those days, my bands printed most of our cassette and CD covers ourselves, and Northeast Reprographics closed at 6 PM sharp. If you needed something printed later than that, perhaps Bangor wasn't the place for you, pal.

Kinko's allowed an artist to pounce on any whim at any time, at reasonable prices, with able assistance from a staff that differed from their clientele in few ways outside of the obligatory black aprons. One of my favorite Portland zines, Heinous, was published by the graveyard guy at that store, so when I had a question, I knew I was asking a qualified consultant. I frequented that Kinko's more than any other establishment on NW 23rd, which is saying a lot considering the street was home to two Coffee People stores, the original pusherman for my then-burgeoning dependency on vanilla lattes. The copiers at Kinko's were state-of-the-art, the atmosphere was clean an efficient, and it was my first favorite place in my adopted city.

That was a decade ago. Since then, I have consistently failed to finish recording my CD projects, have curtailed my printing of chapbooks, and have had little occasion to go to Kinko's. Last night, circumstances (a euphemism for chronic procrastination) required an emergency visit to my old haunt for the printing of a CD cover. I knew it was too much to ask that Heinous Steve be there he was disgruntled 10 years ago---if he was still there, he would likely have become a master of the "accidental" customer papercut), but I figured someone at the NW 23rd store would, if necessary, be able to help me get the job done right.

I was mistaken.

Since my Kinko's heyday, the company has ceased to be satisfied with simple copy services. Not only had they co-branded with FedEx to be a copy shop/shipping source, they had installed a roomful of PCs and Macs to assist their customers with computer access, internet surfing, and design projects. While Mac is reputed to offer more muscle in the realm of design work, PCs still outnumber Macs at a roughly 9-to-1 ratio, so I was surprised to find two Mac Design Centers (both vacant) and only one PC Design Center. (Occupied, by a tenant who looked so entrenched I expected to see a portable microwave installed next to the monitor.) There were no hip young things (staff or customers), no starving artists, no one who would have blended in to the 1994 version of the store. (In fairness, that included the 2005 version of me.)

I explained to a clerk that I had a disc with artwork done on Adobe Illustrator, and while the artist assured me that the files were ready to print, I am a Luddite when it comes to electronic art. (A fact supported by my well-documented crayon fixation.) I asked if he could help, should I need help with the system. He returned an expression that would have been appropriate in response to the question, "Can you come up to the design center to help me deliver a baby?" We had a 5 minute conversation about Illustrator, what it could and could not do, though there was little correlation between our respective comments. He was as helpful with those computers as a User's Manual would have been, assuming it had been printed in Latin.

I opted to take my chances, went up to the Basic PC Workstation desk, inserted my credit card and started my 20 cents per minute fare. Surprise---the computer didn't have Illustrator! (I hate to nitpick, but I think this qualified as essential information in our previous discussion.) I expressed a quiet curse, logged off, paid 40 cents for the nothing, looked over at the PC Design Center and saw the occupant unfurling a bedroll and decided to drive a few miles to the Kinko's downtown.

There I found the PC Design Center available, so I installed my CD and credit card and prepared to preview the files. Nope---no Illustrator on that machine, either. I had begun to find single curses insufficient, stringing them together now in more complex noun-verb arrangements, and opened the PDF version that Jake had kindly included with the project. Printing a page from the computer was 49 cents (versus 8 cents at the copier), so I printed masters of each of the pages, logged off, and went over to photocopiers to complete the job. (49 cents per page---this was not my Kinko's of old.)

The physical condition of the photocopiers was shocking. I do not exaggerate; the 7-11 near my house has a better machine than these. They were older than the copiers I used in 1994, and apparently hadn't been maintained since then, either. They were all the same model, so I picked one at random---lucky me, I picked the one with the paper tray that opened randomly during the printing cycle, each time causing a paper jam that required me to disassemble a significant portion of the machine to resolve the problem. The copier was literally clunky---not the sound of a normal machine in normal operation, but intermittent jarring noises that resembled a two-pound hammer being swung into the central works of the device. (A comparison I would have tested had I brought with me a two-pound hammer.) After 5 comically inconsistent test copies, I beseeched a staff member for assistance. I was gratified that she was enthusiastically quite willing to help, and she likely could have solved my problem had we not been working on the photocopier version of the mainframe computer. It took a total of 26 test printings (for which I had to pay) to finally get the machine adjusted to an acceptable print quality, while I stood by wondering what had gone wrong with the Kinko's business model.

I pondered the partnership with FedEx---had the loss of Kinko's DIY crowd left the company scrambling for additional revenue, or was it merely a copasetic cooperation between the two corporations? Whatever the case, I'm glad it happened: Two stores, no software, 26 test printings? Now when I have printing to do, I can go to Kinko's---and ship it to a copy shop that can get the job done right.

©2005 wpreagan