Hard Copy : Copiers, Faxes Hum All Night for Bleary-Eyed Customers

Four-in-the-morning copy shop humor, Guy Fish-style: Tell the customer you thought he meant 500 copies shred, not red.

Keep the joke going.

As the customer looks at you, with a bleary-eyed, just-get-it-done look, tell him you think you can pretty much glue the shredded mess together in some kind of presentable form.

But under the counter, have 500 printed, perfect red copies ready to the grab.

And, Fish says, know when the joke has gone too far, that moment before the customer slams his fist on the counter, the moment before his hand lurches for those complimentary scissors. . . .

To Fish, the split-second reaction, seen on a customer’s face when he pulls his shred-not-red gag--an instant look of frenzy and doom--can make his whole night.

“For the joke to work, you have to keep a totally straight face,” says Fish, night supervisor of the graveyard shift at Kinko’s Long Beach.

It’s a 24-hour ink joint where giant copy machines named Fred and Wilma ka-chung into the wee hours; the fax machine and laser printer buzz until dawn; and customers filter in like zombies, all with discernible late-night looks of panic and exhaustion in glassy, pleading eyes.

Since he started the graveyard shift a year ago, the 26-year-old Xerox jockey has accumulated many bizarre tales of people driven to the edge by deadlines, semester exams, resume woes, job pressures and Little League newsletters.

He regards with them with a kind of incredulity.

And even fondness.

Fish, dressed in a black shirt and black pants with a gleaming white tie, runs to and from Fred and Wilma loading paper-- runs because he has to, but also because he seems to like helping people out of the muck of despair.

Fish, a smiling, helpful ranger in a forest of terra green and solar yellow (“colors of the week, 6 1/2 cents a copy”), can do everything in Kinko’s--except precisely answer the glaring question:

What are all these people doing here at this hour?

Copy shops, like society, have changed.

Once they were nothing more than drop-off counters where the obligatory “You Want It When?” cartoon hung forbiddingly on a wall, the same spot where a shifty-eyed worker would lean and do just about anything except make photocopies.

But as technology plowed on, society wised up. You do not need a nuclear physics degree to make a photocopy. You do not even need one to clear a paper path when the machine breaks down. And we already know how to use scissors and glue sticks, so hey. . . .

Suddenly, Americans were chanting: We Want It Now. We want it now, even if it means taking matters into our own hands. We’ll set the type on the personal computer and run it out on the laser printer. We’ll pick the colors, set the toner. We’ll cut and paste, reduce and enlarge. We are a people of vision who know that fax number in New York by heart.

Step aside.

The masses have a million little things to do-- right now.

Stores like Kinko’s, now a limited-partnership franchise with 500 locations nationwide (45 in Southern California), capitalize on every man, woman and undergraduate’s need to print things cheaply--6 cents a copy. Invitations, manuscripts, screenplays, cover letters, posters, fliers, Christmas letters and even opera librettos are on the list of things to do.

“It’s like the bar of the 1990s,” one customer t the Long Beach store says with a laugh, while she runs off copies of her resume as the clock nears midnight. Her boss doesn’t know she’s job-hunting, and she casts nervous glances around the store, as if she is about to be caught committing a late-night crime. “I mean, you’ve got all kinds of people in here, dressed in whatever, all getting some kind of fix. Except people are stressed out all the time in here. I know I am.”

The bar image fits: 10 customers slouch against Fish’s counter, while he hops around, helping each one.

Five minutes of his time is precious when there are: self-serve copy machines that need paper refills; people who need 400 fliers in every color of the rainbow (“except salmon,” one customer orders), and another person who needs help running an Apple Macintosh computer.

Let Fish be the bartender, because he says he wants to comfort these people, somehow. And he understands the root of all his stressed-out patrons’ problems: procrastination.

“I try to be as nice as I can to everyone, first thing,” he says. “But, you know, the reason people are always so panicky is because they’ve put off whatever it is they’ve got until the very last minute. It can get wild in here.”

Wild.

Like the man who stumbled into the Long Beach store and had a heart attack. “I mean literally,” says Fish, who called 911.

Or the woman who didn’t want to use the self-service machines and screamed at Fish at 3 a.m. to stop a 1,000-copy job on Fred to make her one copy. “I calmed her down,” he says with pride.

Or the early-morning gang shooting that left a man dead on the street in front of the store, to Fish’s horrified gape. “The store stayed open,” he says and shrugs.

“Kinko’s can get very crazy at night,” agrees Laura Gaber, manager of the Long Beach store. When it began its 24-hour schedule, she says, even employees had a hard time staying awake through the night. “They would call 976-WAKE (a telephone wake-up service) to get them up before the shift was over.”

Now the store’s name is close to becoming a generic term for “late-night copies,” and the days of fighting sleep on the shift are gone.

Other copy shops and photocopy printing firms are staying open 24 hours to meet the demands of people who need to work into the night--”usually because it’s the only time they have free to get stuff done,” Fish says.

In 16 years, three people have been ejected from his store for “overreacting, mainly,” says Eric Brandin, president of the Copy Spot in Santa Monica.

Known by its giant signs and yellow canopies, the store stays open for customers until midnight. But a night shift comes in and finishes large orders for a dawn deadline.

“People are so relieved when they find someone like us open late at night,” Brandin says. “They find out that their daughter has to have 50 copies of the script for the school play the next morning and they say things like ‘Thank God, you’re still open.’ ”

Brandin even has regulars, people who frequent his store so often that they have free rein of the machines.

The store is usually crowded until closing, he adds, and often tension levels rise.

But Brandin has a plan when someone gets a little too panicky, a little too close to the edge: “Basically, I try to isolate the person and get through to them that everything will work out. It’s amazing . . . someone can come in here and they will really be in a panic, all strung out, and all it takes is for them to see that whatever it is will eventually get done. Just watching the copies come out can be soothing for them.

“People are at their worst when they think you aren’t paying attention to their needs,” Brandin continues, almost therapist-like. “When you get a crowd packed in here together, everyone thinks their job is the most important one . . . someone has to be in control.”

It’s after 1 a.m. and Fish is telling stories as fast as copies are spewing out of Fred and Wilma.

Over at the color copier, customer Patrick Whiteleather, 18, is blowing up pictures of Boy George.

“I have to look like this by Friday,” he says, holding up a picture of the pop singer.

As it happens, Whiteleather is a professional Boy George impersonator--and a pro at making his own color copies.

“You see, everybody has their purpose for being here,” Fish says.

A giggling group of teen-age girls struggle to put out a newsletter for their summer camp. They furiously type, cut, glue and chatter. At one of the computers, a woman sits and works on her resume while her boyfriend gives her advice and a neck rub.

Another woman is desperately seeking stencils. “My roommate woke me up and demanded stencils,” she says to Fish, groggily. Since he has none, Fish decides he can go one better and bring this sleepy soul in the 1990s: He has her typeset what she wants on the laser printer, then sends her on her way.

Fish says he’s a vampire: “You get home in the morning and you start doing things, and before you know it, it’s 4 or 5 in the afternoon already, and so I’m like, ‘Should I sleep?’ And I decide not to, and everything’s fine till about 4 a.m. People come in to pick up their copies and go ‘Guy, you really look tired.’ ”

He likes the night crowd, the rock bands who create their psychedelic fliers, the fidgety businessmen fretting over presentations.

“This corner is basically all 24 hours,” he says, motioning to the intersection of 7th Street and Pacific Coast Highway. “You got Jack-in-the-Box,the gas stations, the convenience store, Denny’s. . . . Why should anyone go to sleep?”

Closer to 2 a.m., he unloads reams of paper to last through the night. A cool breeze blows through the store and he pulls the glass door shut and peers out into the night. The neon sign (“Open 24 Hours”) casts a red glow over his face.

For now, it’s just him and the teen-agers’ newsletter frenzy. And for Fish, awaiting the dawn while the copy machines keep rolling, everything is all right.