Priceless lab tech moments.

[Ross Chambers]

Why did it become necessary to remind me of minilabs? AAARgh!

I didn't even own a camera, came from motion picture editing, fell on hard times and ended up as a casual in a minilab, part of a chain, which was a preview of hell, ruled by a fool of a manager who established discounts for all the local suppliers who fed him, drycleaned his clothes, extracted his teeth etc. (we had to remember all these unofficial contras when charging out).

He also had an eye for women--apart from those who worked for him--and sat one object of his lust at the printer for one day, disregarding her absolute lack of knowledge of what she was doing (it took 2 days to reprint every roll, after she left).

He spent another whole day attempting to print B/W from a roll of colour neg., once more for a woman he fancied, of course no other work was done that day and the customers were livid.

The shop was at the top of a staircase leading to a commuter railway station, and the layout of the 2 doors was a perfect shortcut for the endless stream of dusty, gritty feet of non-customers every peak hour.

I'm afraid that this stressful situation did lead me to 1) tell some poor soul to "Fxxk off to the Kodak minilab" and 2) to walk out on him at a busy time of day.

The chain management finally sacked everyone at the branch (not exactly fairly, some were quite competent) but not me, because I wasn't there at the time (see previous paragraph).

I'm not sure whether Kodak appreciated my endorsement; I imagine that the sacked women employees appreciated not having to follow company policy of wearing high heels on tile floors 8 hours a day.

It's not just the clients!

Regards - Ross

 

[lynxkcg]

"The Customer is never wrong"

True

But they can be beligerant, mis-informed, and a PITA!

I assure you, customers are almost always wrong when it comes to film.

 

[fiducio]

Ran out of C41 chemistry.
Ran to target, with a bunch of bulk loaded cassettes.
They call me later asking why they were blank. I told them I load my film into it.
They call me another hour later saying they "called" kodak. (they have a noritsu)
Apparently bulk load film isn't c41...
It's from my 100' roll of Kodak 400UC.
I am now on their "don't process for them" list. :[

 

[Alex Bishop-Thorpe]

I've had that one, and a lab that refused to process my XP2 because it wasnt colour film. I explained it to them several times, and then they got a film picker and pulled the leader out and told me it was the wrong colour and it'd ruin their machine.
Haven't been back there since.

 

[manfromh]

"This job would be so cool if it wasnt for the damn customers"

 

[removed-user-1]

She was upset that she had to wash her print.

A dear friend from college, who took one darkroom course, showed me a few of her prints once. It was clear that she had not fixed or washed them properly... they had already started to show fixer stains after only a few days. That was quite a discussion, which ended with her claiming that she preferred them that way! I wonder if she still has them...

I certainly had experiences with customers who wanted the impossible or would say things like "There's no way my $3,000 camera made pictures this bad!" I usually tried to turn those into educational moments.

One time a customer brought in some 5x7 Kodachrome transparencies from the 1940s that were absolutely stunning; they were family portraits and he wanted to know if we could print them. We didn't have a lab in our tiny store here in Boone, and we would have had to send them out. I told him that his images were historic artifacts and that he would be better off driving them to a pro lab in a nearby city such as Greensboro (the one-hour labs at that time, 1997, didn't have scanners). Before he left I called the other employees over to see those transparencies. That was a good day.