A sympathetic concierge at one hotel suggested that I go across the street to a FedEx Office store: “They have Internet printing there,” he said. An Internet café worked, but how many of those are left? Some places noted, as Twitter did, that they were no longer offering cloud printing, usually because no one was using it. And the rejection mostly continued, as I tried other hotels and offices listed in my directories. Two hours into my cloud-printing journey, I was batting one-for-four. It’s not, nor was it ever, for anyone but an authorized guest with reason to be here in the first place.” I had to produce photo ID at the lobby security desk, and when I couldn’t identify a specific person I wanted to visit, I was politely dismissed.Ī Twitter contact later confirmed that the company once had “a non-firewalled printer for guests to use if they needed to print something while they were meeting at Twitter.” Said the employee: “Later we discontinued it, so it was news to learn that Twitter is listed as a ‘public’ location. I had used one of my app directories to send a job to a printer here, but I couldn’t get anywhere near my printed output. Melissa Riofrio It sure looked like I could print to this printer at Twitter, but that wasn’t the actual case. It’s a hulking Art Deco building that used to house furniture wholesalers. Marijuana smoke wafting from a scruffy group of, er, Civic Center denizens offered another type of cloud experience as I walked the short distance from the library to Twitter’s headquarters. My first successful print job-but the library still has 40 cents of my money on this card. The machine whirred and hummed, and then it printed. I inserted my card and entered a user ID and password on the control panel. Directions posted next to the printer detailed how to do everything, including cloud printing. I had to buy a prepaid card to print or copy the minimum amount you can load is $1. Melissa Riofrio The San Francisco Public Library has readily available cloud printers. A couple of helpful staff members pointed me in the right direction. I had sent my job to a specific printer on the third floor. The main branch of the San Francisco Public Library is open and bright inside, and it was very busy on this Monday around lunchtime. The library took my money and gave me a print The white noise was getting to me, though, so I left. If my print job was here, I had no idea where. I saw no printers, and no one was present. I checked the waiting room and a kitchen, and stopped short of the stairs. I walked down a long hallway, past therapist offices complete with nameplates, closed doors, and deathly quiet-save for the white-noise machines strategically placed to muffle conversation. The foyer was empty, except for a slender console table, an ancient, hissing radiator, and framed artwork on the walls. Melissa Riofrio Could I cloud-print in the Presidio? No, not to this location. Following one of the directories, I made my way to a row of cute Civil War-era cottages, one of which housed a psychotherapy office. On a weekend, I would have been sitting in the sun, ideally with a dog or two as well as some human friends. The outside temperature was a crisp 57 degrees, but in the Presidio National Park, the sun was bright, and the red roofs of the historic buildings glowed against the clear blue sky and masses of trees. We had the printer for a bit in the library until it acted up and we had to replace it.” The entire school now uses iPads, so the IT department installed an AirPlay utility called Printopia that requires user authentication. Shortly after I left, the IT guy emailed me: “The printer is not available on our campus anymore. “It’s not the library printer,” he muttered.īoth confirmed that this printer, wherever it was, was not readily available to the public. I thought it was pretty cool that he could do that. He scrolled through a list of printers on his phone. We wandered around until we found one of the school’s IT guys. We tried to find the printer, but the information I had about it was vague. But could I get to it?Īn acquaintance who works at the school let me in. Melissa Riofrio I sent a print job to a cloud printer here. Wasn’t I already in? I had used a Web-based driver to upload a job to a printer that was listed at this location. The doors are unlocked, but a sign clearly states that visitors must sign in. The front of the school looks like a house of God, with heavy Romanesque arches and columns. Pray all you want, but it probably won’t help you find parking, which is in short supply-and regulated by a secular authority. My first stop was a Catholic high school crammed into a section of San Francisco that also plays host to a public high school and a college.
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