hm this is going to take more careful thought.

[eve11]

While I am all for spending a little bit more money to make life easier, the "drop dissertation off at Staples" option is going to cost nearly $900 to obtain all copies needed for binding & giving to the university library. Part of the problem is all my color graphs and the fact that they will run all pages as color which is six times more expensive than black & white. So I'm thinking i might be able to buy the paper on my own & print it at work, as long as I don't blow out the ink. Or splitting it into 2 documents so that the color & bw pages can be separated out. Should i do different kind of paper for the big graphics pages? Or would 28 grain paper be good enough for everything? The lady at staples said 28 would suffice but did not really seem to be an expert.

ETA: well I've split it out into the color and non-color parts in different files. This will reduce the cost down to a manageable amount, and I will just have to re-collate the pages together and not mess up

Comments

[jenlev.livejournal.com]

Holy bat dren! *hugs* that's quite stunning. Sending you good thoughts and even more congratulations, because despite the cost of copying....wow, you did it!

[eve11]

Got the cost down to $314 for 6 2-sided copies and one 1-sided copy. Hooray, that is definitely more manageable!

[jenlev.livejournal.com]

That must be a huge relief, and very creative by the way. :)

[eve11]

Ha yeah, I got to know Carlos the Brazilian ex-pat who works at the Staples copy center very well, actually, in the time it took to get everything sorted. He's a great guy. He let me into the back as soon as I explained I had four files that needed to be copied 4 different ways; he made sure to use the same premium paper in both printers, let me run test copies to make sure that my page interleavings were correct, and chatted with me about various things (he's been an aviation tech, a dental tech, a plumber, a flight attendant, etc before being a copy guy at Staples), like how when he was still only in the country for a few years in 1979, he had an ESL class where the teacher told him to explain in English how to tie your shoes. Pretty sure after taking many years of Spanish classes, I wouldn't be able to explain how to tie my shoes in Spanish. I even think it would be kind of difficult for me to explain how to do it in English!

It's a good thing I ran all the prices and figured out my ballpark though (I'd guessed at $334 tops), because their machines are counter-intuitive for entering in the price of jobs like this; he first rang it up as like $550 and I said 'no, that can't be right'; so I pulled out my laptop with my calculations in R and we went over them; then he tried something else and it went up, and we both shook our heads, and then he tried again and said "$314" and I said "I'll take it!" LOL.

ETA: Oh and the copies came out looking really, really nice. Much better than the printer and paper at work could have done.

[jenlev.livejournal.com]

That kind of human interaction in the process of addressing this kind of acky thing is what makes me hope for the human species. Plus, it's really nice to meet people that care about what they're doing.