According to Wallace, we’ve missed hurricanes J and K. I’ve never paid so much attention to the weather report before. Or had to. When you start off worrying about the weather, you are just cutting into your enjoyment of the good life. If you don’t lose sleep over blizzards or earthquakes, then don’t fret about hurricanes. As Eric pointed out, the real panic from the storm is not from the water, it is from the wind. Eric, you can say that again.During the course of the day, I examined a variety of printer management applications. They range in price from free to $950. In typically sordid Internet fashion, the most expensive version comes up on a search with the criteria “freeware”. Finally, I just chose the cheapest one that sounded like it might work, an offering called “Cyclope”. The rest of the day was spent unsuccessfully trying to get it to work after it was installed.
There is already a potential billing problem. I have to charge the same price whether a customer prints a blank page or a full page color picture. What is a standard printed page? This harks back to my job at Kinko’s. (Ventura Boulevard, Studio City, 1991.) The worst customer was an insipid housewife who would not edit her work on-screen. She would print out all five pages, find the first mistake, correct it and print all five again. After two hours of this, she would throw the pile in the trash and try to get away with paying for the final copy. She, of course, hated me, for I would charge her full price every time whenever I was on duty. That housewife crap only goes so far with me.
There is software which will measure the “print density”. The product I glanced at was for diagnostics. It printed a series of graphs showing total ink usage by color and coverage. Trying to bill with it would open a can of worms. It was designed to administer cost allocation. A standard printed page is, to me, roughly what you see here. That is, 5% black ink coverage over an area of 54 square inches with a single picture or graphic of less than 4 square inches.
ISO layers, I believe, stands for “Is Stupid Orwhat” Some thirty years ago, a group of over-educated losers got together and decided instead of forcing the engineering community to, over time, simplify networking, they should design some “standards”. It is no wonder the individuals who wrote the ISO standards don’t give out their real names. It is just retarded to behave as though someone who networks a computer wouldn’t also network the printer attached to the computer, yet that is how they arranged things.
So you’ll know, I spent another day in the shop sorting out the software. There are at least three different grades of “network” and they often overwrite or cancel out registry values without permission. I will get it to work but in return, you can ponder why it costs so dern much to get this kind of operation up and running. My guess is, if you bring in hired help, you’ll pay around $4,800 for software labor (in your average café) before you earn a penny. This meshes with my other guess of around $12,000 in fixed costs to set up a workable store for yourself.
For all the said effort, I can state that I have a simpler operation. The staff is now able to complete transactions in a matter of seconds and have learned how to reset the machines when things go awry. The trick is to always return to a known situation before doing a reset for the next customer. The shop lingo is already showing this familiarity, where we will “fire three” or “purple screen” on a regular basis. Anyway, be aware of these almost hidden “software” costs that do not seem to be included in the estimates. It is going to cost you a lot above the price of the disks to get the simplest software to do what it claims. Worse, there is no guaranty that spending more will get you anything better.
I would be tempted to advise people not to install anything they don’t understand, but then there would be very few Internet Cafés. What we really need is a café for cats, preferably one where you drop them off Monday and collect them back Friday. For poor, starving orphan cats like Pudding-Tat, just listen to her. How will she ever survive until nap time?
