Down with Meijer!

Alright. I know I said in my last post that this post would include pictures from my trip, and I promise that'll come a little later, but first I must take this opportunity to rant about the apparently impossible task of getting my digital pictures printed. What a fiasco.

First, I went to Walgreens where the lovely machine has its own printer and it automatically prints as it goes and you get your pictures. Instant gratification, I love it. HOWEVER, there was this chick there with like 3 CD's full of pictures jabbering away on her cell phone and the machine froze up trying to print all her pictures. So she restarted it and told me I could go ahead of her. Only the machine froze AGAIN. And this time they had to unplug it and totally restart the whole thing. By now there is yet another lady in line and this chick is still yammering away so I just left rather than deal with it.

My next stop is Meijer, where it turns out they're having a sale, so each print is .24 instead of .29. Lovely. I go through the entire memory card and send off 31 pictures to be printed. The lady working then has me fill out an envelope with my job # from the "self serve" kiosk and the size I got and how many pictures I had. So my envelope says something to the effect of "9592" "4x6" "~31 prints". She then looks at me and says, "they may or may not be done today." I ask her, "if there was a chance they were going to be done today, what time would you recommend I check back?" This appears to greatly offend her and she says in a rude tone of voice, "I shut down at 10. If I don't get to them by then you can't have them until tomorrow."

*Let me just interject here and say that it completely defeats the purpose of the SELF-SERVE kiosk if you cannot, in fact, serve yourself and you still have to wait for someone else to print your photos. *

Fast forward to this afternoon. I decide to pick up said pictures on my lunch hour, only the lady working today can't seem to find them. So she asks her coworker if he may have printed them, and he says, "I printed one order this morning, but there were only 8 pictures." She went to look for them, and there was my name, and lo and behold they were my pictures, but there were only eight. I asked her what happened to my other 23 pictures and she just sort of looked at me blankly, shrugged and asked if I wanted to pay for my pictures there or up front. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!

So, now, after work I will go to a THIRD place and try to print my pictures AGAIN. And, if I still have time tonight I'll load them onto my computer and show a few of them to you.

Cheers!