My horrible experience at FedEx Kinko's

I needed to have something printed, filled out, scanned, and email'd (a horrible workflow yet needed by many companies). I'm currently out of town and at my sisters place, which doesn't have a scanner nor a printer (hey neither do I). The town she lives in doesn't have any public libraries or a kinko's, but the neighboring town 20 minutes away does. So, I loaded up the document I would need onto a USB drive and packed a laptop (just in case) and headed on out.

When I got there, there was two sets of computer areas. The first contained their machines, and the second contained open areas for laptops. All I needed to do was print a PDF from a thumb drive so I hopped on their computers. When you sign in, you are asked what the purpose of needing the computer is. I clicked the obvious print station option. After about 5 minutes, the computer program had loaded the next screen. These things charge by the minute, and I was surprised how long it took to load their application.

Turns out, their print option is only good for designing things using their crappy software and then printing them out. They do not allow access to Explorer or any tools which can read a USB drive. I got annoyed by this, logged out, got my credit card back, and headed over to the area for laptops.

These little booths have three things in them. A credit card reader, an ethernet cord, and a USB cord. Shit. That means I'm probably going to have to do something with a binary they provide. I login, plug in the cords, and insert my credit card. Surely enough, the USB cord appears on the desktop as a CD-ROM device with a bunch of binaries for OS X and Windows. Well, there's no way in hell I'm going to install their crappy software on my main OS, so I boot up windows in a Virtual Machine, configure the tool to send the ethernet and USB connection directly to Windows.

I installed their software, and of course a bunch of printers are attached to the OS now. I then pop in my USB drive into the remaining USB port on my MBP and open the files. Oh yeah, this whole time a timer is running in the corner of Windows, showing the steadily increasing charges.

My copy of Windows didn't come with a PDF reader. Still not sure why any modern OS wouldn't ship with one of these; OS X does, every decent flavor of Linux does, but M$ apparently doesn't want to ship one. So I had to download a copy of that (their internet is crazy slow btw, which helps increase costs). Finally, I was able to print to their printer. I get a little window telling me it's going to cost about three bucks to print the five black and white pages, and I hit OK. I grabbed the printouts, wrote down my answers, and was ready for the next step.

The don't have scanners available on the floor, you have to go to the people behind the counters and ask them to do it. So, I handed them my five sheets of paper, and was told it costs 90 cents per page to scan them. Ridiculous I thought, but I've come this far. A few minutes later and they were scanned. Now, it was time to put the PDF onto my thumb drive. I handed them my drive (which is a tiny thing, it's one of those open metal ones which doesn't have the shield over the connection).

The lady behind the counter proceeds to plug it in the wrong direction on every port of the computer, not understanding the Windows error that there was a surge on the USB port. She may or may not have burned up a few ports in the process. I then yell back to her than she needs to plug it in the other way, and she proceeds. But, she gets an error message that the device isn't formatted. She starts to click the options to format the device before a co-worker runs up to her and tells her not to do it. The device is 16 GB, FAT32, so I'm not sure what the problem was, probably some goofy XP compatibility issue.

So, she tells me the drive doesn't work. I tell her that she can just email the files to me. At this point her and two co-workers look at me like I'm an idiot, and say, “Oh no no no, we don't email here”. Okay, I ask if they have a USB drive floating around that they could copy the files to and I could just copy to my laptop while I'm here. “Oh no, we don't have USB drives here. But, you can buy one. They're on sale and a good deal too, 8GB for $20!” At this point I look at them like they're stupid.

I fish around my bag and was able to find an old drive that was only 1GB, and hand that to them. They were able to copy the files over this time and hand me the drive. Now it's time to pay the bill. I hand them my card, they run it, and I go to sign on their little digital screen. Now, most of these screens have a little bounding box around the screen, and when you sign outside of the box, it is un-spoken-ly understood that yeah, those pixels were lost, so what. But, this device felt the need to display a popup warning every time it happened, which needed to be confirmed.

In conclusion, I couldn't believe how crappy my experience at FedEx Kinko's was. I understand the need to cater to a dumb user by using binary installers, but maybe have a secondary option for us geeks to simply print to a network printer. If binary files are ever needed, your solution is incorrect. And, why didn't they have any USB drives available? They're business model is centered around making more money, not keeping people happy.

Thomas has contributed to dozens of enterprise Node.js services and has worked for a company dedicated to securing Node.js. He has spoken at several conferences on Node.js and JavaScript, is an O'Reilly published author, and is an organizer of NodeSchool SF.