Last night Brett arrived in New York around 10:15. After sitting in traffic in front of the Holland Bridge for five-plus minutes, Brett hopped out of the cab and walked the remaining three blocks to our hotel. Once here, we met up and trucked on over to Kinko's to pick up the User Manuals for the Training Sessions we were in town for.
The lady at Kinko's couldn't find our order. Earlier on Saturday, Brett had put in the order over their web site, and had asked for a 1 PM finish time on Sunday. The lady also couldn't find any record of that order, even though Brett had talked to someone on the phone and they had confirmed that they had the file to be printed. With Brett's help, she finally found the file and we sent it to the color printer to find out how it looked printed out. She had trouble with that, as she couldn't get the color printer to print.
After messing around with that, we finally had a print out - 35 minutes later. New problem... the color print out was in grayscale, no color. So we spent the next 15 minutes trying to troubleshoot why it wasn't printing in color. Several attempts later, Brett and I were ready to just have half the order printed in grayscale so that we could head out and eat. While they were discussing how many copies we needed, I walked over to the color printer's print queue. I noticed the several attempts that we had just done during the past 50 minutes. Oddly, I also noticed the same document being printed 70 times, at 4:00 PM.
I called Brett and the lady over to look at the entry, our order had apparently been filled already. She looked at the file name (HHC) and said, "Ohhhhhhhhhh, maybe they put it under HHC." She went up front and looked inside a cabinet and found nothing. She had a particularly hard time opening the cabinet because there was a box in front of it... WITH OUR PRINT OUTS IN IT!!! Right there, on the box, was a sticker labeled "HHC." She opened the box, and sure enough, there were all 70 print outs, in color, ready to go.
And then the unexpected happened (because really, what could possibly happen next that we weren't expecting). Chuckling to herself, she looked up, smiled, and said, "Oh my god, I was the one who filled this order." WHAT!??!? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? YOU WERE THE ONE WHO FILLED THIS ORDER, AT 4 PM TODAY, AND YOU DIDN'T REALIZE THAT WE WERE LOOKING AT THE SAME DOCUMENT FOR AN HOUR NOW??? AN HOUR!!!!! Ready to get out of there, we paid for our copies (an amount worthy of a lottery-winning), and as we walked out the door to her yelling this advice to us, "next time tell them to put it under the person's name." Translation: next time tell ME to put it under the person's name. There won't be a next time, I promise.
We returned to the hotel, dropped off the copies, and walked around the block to grab a bite to eat. It was super late, but we were both very hungry. We had supper at The Blue Ribon and got back to the hotel around 2:30 AM. What an extremely eventful day, only to be nearly topped by our morning at the training sessions with our clients. That's another story, for another time, and probably not on this blog.
Tonight, I'm feeling a bit under the weather... need to catch up on sleep. So, I'm staying in, ordering pizza from room service, watching television, and doing nothing else. A bit lame to do in New York, but that's what I'm doing. G'night.
+ original post date: April 19, 2004 06:36 PM
+ categories: Travel/Vacations
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