Monday, November 29, 2010
Printing a ticket
I had a 5 PM bus out of Chennai, so I checked out of the hotel at 1, left my bags at the reception, and headed out to lunch with Billy. When we returned at 4 to take the luggage, I remembered I hadn’t yet printed my ticket, so asked the hotel manager if I could take a print.
“No problem,” he said, and handed me a business card. “Email it to me.”
Umm, from where? Maybe I could unpack my laptop, plugin a data card, go online, and send him the file. Or wait, the ticket was in Dropbox. I have a Dropbox app on my phone. Maybe I could email from the phone? Then I had to shake myself out of being a geek. This was going to take many precious minutes and I was in a rush. I simply asked him, “from where?”
He pointed at a computer meant for guests to check email. It was already powered on (minutes saved!) so I logged into Dropbox, opened the PDF file and hit Print. No printers configured. Then I saved it to Desktop, asked if he could open it over the network. Nope, he didn’t know what that was. Logged into Gmail, mailed him the file, logged out, and asked him to check.
“Not arrived,” he said.
“Refresh?”
He had Outlook on his desktop. I found his Refresh button and hit it, but no mail showed up. I was losing precious minutes, so I asked if I couldn’t just download it to his computer. He agreed. I logged into Dropbox again and located the file. It opened in Word and showed a lot of gibberish. Why was a PDF file opening in Word? I closed the window, downloaded it again, located it on the desktop, right clicked, and selected “Open With…”. The only available option was “Microsoft Word”. Didn’t he have Acrobat Reader? He had no idea what that was.
What kind of hotel has never had to deal with a PDF file before?
“What do I do now?”
“Email it to me.”
“But you don’t have Acrobat Reader.”
“Then you talk to my office manager.”
And he pointed me to a third computer with a chap sitting at it. I explained to him that I needed to print a PDF file and one computer didn’t have a printer while the other didn’t have a PDF reader. He said “no problem, email it to me.” I said the file was already on two computers, couldn’t he just take it off the LAN? “No, that’s not configured.”
Then he suggested I download it again to his computer. This time, finally, he had both a printer and a PDF reader.
Cheeni — Nov 29, 2010 6:22:24 PM — # ↩
Someday soon cloud printing will be a reality. Or all printers will speak post script and accept print jobs over the internet.
Onkar — Nov 30, 2010 7:19:06 PM — # ↩
Cheeni,
Smart use of IPP[1] could make printing over internet possible.
[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol
Aditi — Nov 29, 2010 6:25:36 PM — # ↩
Upload the pdf file to Google docs, open it in google docs and print.
Kiran Jonnalagadda — Nov 29, 2010 6:47:13 PM — # ↩
Last thing I’d have thought of in that desperate moment. Should keep in mind for next time. :-)
| Balu | — Feb 2, 2011 10:27:06 PM — # ↩
Google Docs saved my ass a lot of times when it came to pdfs =)
Mithun Kumar — Nov 29, 2010 6:39:19 PM — # ↩
Ha Ha Ha…
Quite an adventure :)
Well narrated!
Sathya — Nov 29, 2010 7:30:51 PM — # ↩
Have done this in the past - Ctrl L on the comp which has PDF Viewer - Print Screen - Paste onto MSPAINT (present on all comps, hopefully) - save as jpg. Send.
Shoan Motwani — Nov 29, 2010 8:08:59 PM — # ↩
On my last trip to Florida, I had a similar experience. I needed to have a pdf containing my tickets to be printed and the hotel front desk told me that they had no access to email and cannot accept a usb drive. She wanted a url from me.
I uploaded the pdf to google docs and created a bit.ly url for it. She happily obliged to print multiple copies.
Onkar — Nov 30, 2010 7:15:57 PM — # ↩
So next time print the ticket in time. :-)
Yuvi — Dec 4, 2010 11:55:50 PM — # ↩
Why was I expecting this to end with rude employees who let you wait for a hour or so while they chatter away on the phone while avoiding eye contact with you?
Diabolic Preacher — Dec 11, 2010 3:47:49 AM — # ↩
You could keep a copy of SumatraPDF (zip i think, unless u can download a folder from Dropbox) Portable version in your Dropbox a/c. This is for the occassion when you aren’t allowed a usb drive but can download file (to print…or in this case display). One has to be prepared for the worst case scenario it seems.
Thejesh GN — Dec 21, 2010 11:44:09 AM — # ↩
Go to Airport (to the respective airline office) and ask them for the printout. It has worked for me.
Kiran Jonnalagadda — Dec 21, 2010 12:46:33 PM — # ↩
This was for a bus ticket. Turned out they didn’t want the printout anyway. They just wanted my name.
Ishan Chattopadhyaya — Dec 27, 2010 11:17:38 AM — # ↩
Quite interesting, happens to me often. What was the eventual turn around time for the ticket printout?
Vishal — Dec 28, 2010 2:45:54 PM — # ↩
I had same experience for a train ticket. I was lucky, TT allowed me to continue the journey when I showed him the softcopy on my cellphone:)