At the Copy Shop

From Tennyson's The Princess:

Sweet and low, sweet and low,
Wind of the western sea,
Low, low, breathe and blow,
Wind of the western sea!

I read somewhere about printing cutting plans full size. It makes sense—take the plans to the copy shop on a cd and the copy shop gives you a 5m roll of paper which you align on your butted sheets of ply and fix. Then you make a small hole at each co-ordinate and mark the wood underneath, remove the paper, join the dots and you’ve avoided all the fiddly measuring of x and y. It sounded like a good idea so I took a cd along to the shop and asked for a quote mentally totting up what I could spend, about 40€ seemed reasonable. Well the chappy did some adding up, asked me what sort of paper I wanted; the lightest I said, then he was back to the computer screen and after a while looked up with a big smile on his face and exclaimed 400€.

Blimy, this could be an expensive boat if I wanted it to be. The reason for the exorbitant pricing was that the copier only takes a certain type of photographic paper. Then why did he ask what sort of paper I wanted? Well there was a more expensive, better quality one if I wanted it. The other alternative was to try copy shops 100km away in Barcelona.

Toying with the idea of a trip to the city I realised that measuring out the co-ordinates was something I was quite looking forward to, something to be painstaking about. I was relieved that the temptation to go down the paper route had been ruled out. I’m not convinced it would have worked either; imagine tussling with an unwieldy bolt of paper, it catching the wind, snagging and ripping or getting wet, more trouble than it’s worth.

I might just have had a lucky escape from an expensive cock-up.

And so the day ended.