Never More of the Same

Copy center employee Raffa Orozco recalls the night a disgruntled customer approached him, cursing and twirling a sword in each hand.

“He’d been glaring at me from the self-serve copier,” Orozco says. “He was upset because our prices for copies were slightly higher than others’. . . . He went to his car and came back with these ninja knives.”

After four years working the graveyard shift at Kinko’s Copies in Fullerton, Orozco, 30, has a store of tales, though not all so dramatic, about his clientele. They are the people who need to bind, laminate, collate, fax, photocopy, staple, type, e-mail, hole-punch, highlight, word-process, print or have a videoconference between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.

The threat of a call to police sent the sword-wielding malcontent on his way, Orozco says. He has six surveillance cameras to keep an electronic eye on the room, just in case of trouble, but most customers are just there to get a job done. They drift in all night to use workstations complete with stick-on notes and correction fluid, paper clips and scissors.

On a recent evening, a red-eyed Kristen Reyes comes in just past midnight to cobble together a flier for a national Christian conference.

“We’ll be here tomorrow while the rest of our youth group is at Magic Mountain,” says Reyes, 19.

Helping her meet the deadline is her pastor, Scott Gurule. Rather than bring a computer with them to Southern California, Reyes and Gurule decide to wrap up the flier project by e-mail on copy center equipment.

After the church staffers leave, a man on a personal mission arrives. Sasan Banava, 22, of Walnut Creek is in town to meet a Laguna Beach woman with whom he’s been having an online romance.

Now that he’s here, though, his cyber-sweetie won’t give him her phone number or return his calls. So he has spent much of his four-day visit in copy centers, checking to see if she might have sent him an e-mail to set up a rendezvous.

This night he’s in luck--he hears from her. But his face falls as he signs off. “She said in this e-mail that she lost my number,” he says dejectedly. “She’s lying.”

Another customer drifts in.

Will Gehman, holding a newspaper in his hand, says to Orozco: “Raffa, you better catch up on what’s happening with Clinton.”

Gehman, 80, is a regular. His wife of 57 years is ill, and he cares for her at their Anaheim home. “This is the only time she sleeps, so I do my errands,” Gehman says. He nods toward Orozco: “He’s the only one who will talk to me at this hour.”

Orozco, pointing to Gehman’s floral shirt, says, “At least you’re not wearing your pajamas tonight.”

This night, Gehman wants copies of some legal documents.

“Do you want this stapled too?” Orozco asks.

“No staples!” Gehman says.

“No problem.”

“You never have a problem.”

“Only on payday,” Orozco says with a smile.

In the predawn stillness, there’s a lull in business. Cori Ortiz, Orozco’s colleague, takes a catnap in the break room against a backdrop of paper stacked to the ceiling in reams labeled “sunburst yellow,” “lunar blue” and “gamma green.”

Orozco takes off his tie--the bane of his job--as his shift ends. “I tend to sweat a lot, running back and forth between the copiers,” he says. “It’s a thrill every half-second.”

Ortiz, refreshed by her nap, returns to the front counter to prepare for the burst of early-morning business.

Truck driver John Berberich pops in to make copies of his logbook. “There are always a few people here,” he says. “Some nights, it’s almost a night life.”

Berberich says he’s seen some subversive literature duplicated in the wee hours. “Some off-the-wall things are printed at night,” he says.

Orozco and Ortiz say their customers are furtive sometimes, but the two take a live-and-let-live attitude. They don’t check up on people. If they are making copies for someone, though, they won’t violate copyright laws.

“Sure, sometimes we have some seedy customers,” says Ortiz, 37. “But the customer is the one pressing the button.”

She says she uses her discretion about what she’ll copy. “If it’s something about child molestation or bestiality, I won’t copy it,” she says. “That goes against my moral character.”