So the other day I went to Staples to print out some cover proofs in colour. The cover measures 9.5 x 10.75 so it won’t fit full size on 8.5 x 11 sheet. So I picked tabloid on the colour printer and choked the machine. Stupid colour copiers. The machine of course, charged me almost $4 for the 4 copies I didn’t get. But the nice lady at the counter happily took my USB stick and set up the job to send to her behind-the-counter printer and all seemed well.

Just as she sent it, she mentioned there would be white space at the top and bottom and was that ok. I said sure, the cover was only 9 x 10 and there would be whitespace all around. At this, she screwed up her face and cancelled the print job. While she reset the print parameters, she told me that the reason the other copier had choked was because I was trying to print a file that was the wrong size. The next time I had an odd size I should just come to the counter and for a $3 service fee she would “fix” my file. Because the  software they used automatically expanded the image to fit the paper size. And they had to tell it not to do that.

So to summarize, she (Staples) would charge me $3 ($2 if it was not a rush job) to print out my file at the size my file was. It was ‘free’ to blow it up to a bigger size, but would cost me almost double if I wanted it just the way I supplied it.

Kill me now…