Topic: A Stranger

Author: Chris Dunn

No offense meant to my present employer, or to any of the publishers who’ve given me work over the years, but my favorite job has always been 3^rd shift at Kinko’s. I worked most shifts alone with a stack of projects to be finished by morning. My shifts ran 10 hours with 4 days on followed by 4 days off. Every break was like a mini-vacation and each work week was a hectic blur. I still got to hang out with the normal 9 to 5 people, just when they were getting up, I was going to bed and vice-versa. We could share a meal and then they would head off to work while I went to sleep, and then we’d meet on the other side, share an evening and then reverse the work/sleep paradigm. The job was great, too. Each day presented a series of puzzles to be solved using the variety of tools at hand. Get the big copy job running on the utility machine while you scan the photos into the docutech. Once that’s done, start the docutech job and the second print job on the utility, while you bind the original utility project. If you time it right, you drop the bound project on the finished table on your way to snatch the docutech pages and take them over to the booklet maker. If you were good, and I was, you got to spend an hour or two loading machines and shelves with paper, and then spend the final hours before morning reading a book or plotting your next campaign. Sheer bliss, for the most part. The only thing that ever caused disruption to this paradise was, oddly, the customers.

Now think for a second. What kind of people do you see coming into a copy shop at 2 in the morning? My clientele wasn’t the daytime parade of businessmen seeking business cards or snooty Hyde Park women shocked to find that their hand-scanned, twenty-page booklet couldn’t be completed immediately. I didn’t get the hopeful graduates needing 30 copies of their empty resume on off-white linen. No, as was once intoned in song, the freaks come out at night.

Sure, there were some students, usually design students desperate to finish their project to an exacting standard before the start of class at 8 am, but they were the exceptions. I heard more than my share of grifter sob stories, each alike in detail, just needing a few dollars for the bus or a taxi. Their sick children waiting at home for their medication… The stupid car that broke down at the worst time… Then there was the guy who demanded precise color copies of his hand sketches of ballerinas typically drawn from particularly risqué angles. Lots of personal projects with hours at the self-serve machines followed by further hours spent with x-acto knives giving them the perfect finish. For the most part these were harmless and kept to themselves. The only worry was how loud I could pitch my music when they were in the store.

Then there was this one guy… He came in a lot! And he was weird. Tall and heavy-set with his hair shaved close to the skull. He spoke in a mumbled, mushy slur and would often join me on smoke breaks, regaling me with anecdotes from the home where he was staying. I got the distinct feeling this place was an institution of some sort. He always wore sweat pants and a baggy t-shirt, arriving – typically at 2ish – and departing come morning, always by taxi. He would spend those hours copying, cutting, reducing and pasting up the results with determined precision, pouring over a collection of political thrillers he carried in a weathered, green military backpack. Until finally bringing me his creation of the night. “Can I get this laminated?” he’d ask.

The first time, I stood before the laminator waiting for the heating element to warm up, and I looked down and realized what I was holding, I was faced with a bit of a moral quandary. What my mysterious stranger had made was a fake CIA badge with his own picture placed in the corner and his personal information spelled out next to an official looking seal and some carefully arranged detailing. What was he going to do with this? Nothing good, probably. And if he does try to do something… odd with it, does that make me an accomplice? Official work policy is that we do not look at customer copy. That’s an invasion of privacy. but what if he tried to use this thing to gain access to some government facility, or worse?! This was pre-911, so terrorism didn’t enter my mind. I was more afraid of something John Hinckley-ish. Did I need to do something?

In the end, I decided that any government building or official that could be bypassed with this obviously hand-crafted forgery deserved to get taken. Yeah, this guy had spent hours putting it together, but even his best effort still could only yield a toner-flecked, slightly crooked mock-up. This wasn’t the movie scene where the hero waits for hours in a dank basement for perfect forgeries made by a man who refused to allow his face to be seen. This was made under bright lights at 2 in the morning by a guy with obvious learning disabilities. I logged him in my memory and rang up the sale.

For the next few days though, I told the story and watched the news wondering if I’d see a, “Ohio man attempts to gain access to Fort…” story with my nocturnal forger’s mug splashed on the screen, but none came. He continued to come periodically over the next few months, and I made him several such ID’s for many different government agencies and buildings. He was harmless. I’m pretty sure. I mean, everybody needs a hobby, right?