You’ll be jealous of my errands, and these ads

Finals day today. My students feverishly were emailing in the last of the work I’ve challenged them with and made them endure this term. Well, some raced. One student turned in the final work on Friday.

The rest, well, they knew they had until 3 p.m., the end of our scheduled final block.

“Three p.m.,” I said, “does not mean 3:01. One minute after means that’s one less I have to grade.”

They’re going to live in a deadline-driven world.

The last paper came in at about 2:28, so the message was received. Also, I must now grade them all.

Want to see an amazing story?

“Why do it?”

“It makes me feel normal and whole.”

Watch this video. But you have to watch the entire thing. And it is absolutely worth watching the whole thing.

I ran errands today. Here are the three least exciting parts of that: I visited an eye doctor’s office to make an appointment for later in the week. A nice young lady answered all of my questions with a laugh an assuring assurance. They booked me for Thursday.

Are you riveted?

I washed my car. And then I took the floor mats out and dropped them through this shaker machine that gets 98 percent of the grass and leaves and crumbs off of them. And then I vacuumed the rest of the trash off of the mats and the floor boards. I noticed that my car wasn’t completely clean, but it was closer to clean than it has been in a while. I’d been enjoying an industrial grade of autumn dust lately.

I got gas. I dropped my card at the pump twice.

The other thing I did was slightly more interesting than that, somehow, and it will be the subject of Wednesday’s post.

To wrap up today, and in honor of finals — and because these are two of the last four clips I have at the moment, here are two old ads from mid-1980s Crimson issues. Two things you don’t think about so much any more, I’d bet:

film ad

John’s is closed now, but it has a special place in history. It was opened in 1959, the first color film processing lab in the state. John was 24. There used to be at least four locations. Two were in strip malls. One building is now vacant. The other now has either a hotel or a car dealership on the old lot. Based on some canceled trademarks registered to the owner, I’m assuming the stores closed about two years after this ad ran. He died just over six years ago.

Bet you haven’t said “I need to run to Kinko’s!” in a good long while:

Kinkos

There are apparently still over 2,000 FedEx stores, which is the brand now, of course. It is the seventh largest printing chain in the country and Kinko’s is nothing but a memory. And it was so close to becoming a proprietary eponym, too.

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