Bear with me, this anecdote went longer than expected but basically is an interesting encounter with an Athens copyshop/shipping center owner or employee during my trip to Greece. Enjoy...
So once the joint Greece vacation with my wife was over and she had a conference to attend I found out I had some urgent business to attend to. A nearly 20-page document needed to be printed, signed, and scanned for a quick return. Well, I did a quick google search and it turns out the printing shops did not do a good job of using English search terms for internet listings so I decided to try the Hilton business center figuring it would be more expensive but at least convenient. So I find the business center and just need to figure out how to login to the computers, hoping it will be easy to pay cash rather than charging to the room since it is a personal task rather than related to my wife's work. As expected, the hotel charges an expensive 0.74 Euro/page to print black/white. That's a little steep I figure but for the convenience I guess I'll deal with it. But can I use the scanner? They will, for my convenience, scan the document for me for only 5 Euro/page. Or, I can scan it myself for 5 Euro/page! The scanner would have paid for itself in a single transaction if I did that. No longer was this in any way reasonable to me. Now that it was obvious they were in NO way competitive I decided to ask at the front desk for another shop in the area. They of course were recommending their center and ready to walk me to it but I explained how I'd already been there and he was at least nice enough to search for me and find a close alternative. On the way to the alternative I happened upon a printing/shipping/Western Union shop and walked in. Luckily the man spoke English well said it was 0.15 Euro/page to print and he would scan the document for 5 Euro. Great, I figured, saves me 100 Euro. This guy is getting phone calls right and left as I sift through the papers signing and initialing as needed, but he's paying just enough attention to me to realize he'll need to scan more than just a few sheets. He had originally suggested only printing pages as necessary and I hadn't reviewed it all yet so I figured for .15 Euro/sheet just print it all. I guess he had anticipated it would only be a final signature page or something so now he's ready to renegotiate (a common trend in Athens as I'll try to blog later albeit he had a much nobler position than most) the 5 Euro quoted for scanning. I asked about a feeder and he pointed to a machine indicating that it didn't work anymore so he'd only have the standard flatbed scanner to use. OK, I knew the alternative was 100 Euro, and also that although frustrating it still wasn't much more difficult to scan 20 pages than it was to scan 3. So I offered 10 Euros and he said OK, and something to the affect that everybody is under tough times right now. I finish up my signatures and wait for him to finish his current and obviously personal phone call before bringing him the document to scan. He gets another call whilst preparing the scanner, scanned one page or two, and once the call was over he asked if I would do the scanning. No charge he says, and gestures me over to his laptop and scanner. No big deal, I'm waiting just as long whether I do it myself or not. So he starts to show me how to do it and the screen is all in Greek except for "(*.jpeg)" and I can only imagine emailing 20 picture files in response to a PDF but the drop-down only has other picture formats. He doesn't quite understand my concern as he is trying to show me how to use the scanner but gets another call and walks outside the store to talk. After about 10 minutes of going back and forth through the various windows and buttons of the scanner program (including two minutes trying to figure out an easy way to change the display language—it's way easier in internet café's where they are used to international customers) I finally see *.PDF as a file option and can begin a process that will culminate in a useful result. I was hoping I'd get a popup after the scan like my Canon multifunction which defaults to "Scan" with another option to "exit" once finished scanning. Luckily despite not having that I had used a similar HP scanner before and figured out which button to use for scanning an additional page and persevered through the tedious process with the occasional task of rotating a page that auto-detected incorrectly. Oh, and throughout this by about page 13 I had listened to his cell phone which was left on the desk in front of his laptop ring unanswered three separate times at which point I finally carried it outside to him assuming it must be some emergency and he was still outside chatting away on the cordless landline phone unable to hear his cell. He thanked me and resumed his conversation as I went back in to finish up my scanning. At last the final page was scanned, and provided some tense moments as I tried a few different buttons to save or complete the file hoping I wouldn't accidentally lose all of the work. About the third button I tried (remember they are all labeled in Greek) appeared to work and showed me a file location on the computer that the document was saved to. Now I was ready to get his help finding the location in the computer to copy it over to my USB stick and complete my mission. When he came over he was able to help me navigate, he translated part of the location to "My Documents" but that didn't really help me much since it's all Greek to me—OK, I had to throw that in, but really what's the obvious difference between My Documents, My Pictures, and My Music or whatever when the icons are not showing and it's printed in Greek? Anyways he walked me through it and afterwards I tried to show him the button in HP software that allows one to scan in PDF (probably labeled the Greek equivalent of "Scan Document" as opposed to "Scan Picture" but he didn't seem to care or else didn't understand the significance. I collected my printout, ejected my USB key, deleted the file from his computer, and he took out his calculator to multiply 19 pages by 0.15 Euro/page and asked me for 2.85 Euro. What an experience!
I can only imagine the future of Greece if this is a representative sample of Greek small business. We've watched the Euro fall from $1.43 to $1.35 while in Greece and its directly attributable to what's going on in Greece. It's good we were here for vacation in advance of the conference or my wife would've had a terrible time traveling in since there was a complete transportation strike on the opening day of the conference; taxis, metro, and a 3-hour air traffic control strike. I don't know what the taxis are striking about, they screw every tourist they pickup, or at least try to; but that's another blog...
No comments:
Post a Comment