The Customer is Always Right ....

From time to time I have to repeat this, helps calm me down. I had to say it quite a few times this morning.

Last week a chap rang, he'd got back from holiday to find his basement flat had been flooded. Thankfully his landlord lived in an upper floor so most of the water had been mopped up but many of his possessions had been damaged, including his photos. He described them as wrinkled and eaten away at the edges but they had been dried. Could we scan them? Trying to be helpful I said we'd try.

So a couple of days later just over 800 photos arrived in a box. They were certainly crinkled and around the edges the coloured material of the photo seemed to have come away from the glossy surface. Some had chunks of paper missing, but most were in reasonable condition. I fired up our scanner and crossed my fingers. The Kodak s1220 has an amazing feed mechanism (improved in later models) and the prints could be fed in quite easily, albeit one-by-one, and some hours later the photo scanning exercise was complete.

Today we got an email from the client. He was not happy, well, half not happy. He pointed to some defects in our service. Many of the images, particularly those which should have had a smooth blue sky, showed unacceptable hard lines. Clearly the scanner sees alternative shades of blue as the print surface wrinkles closer and further from the scanner glass. Then the colour restore function in effect hardens a line that shouldn't be present.

No, no thought for what we had achieved - in double quick time he had fixed these images against more decay; that at least half had been properly scanned despite the physical damage to the original.

The client suggested the photos would be better if scanned on a flatbed scanner. I said I thought this ought to be the case as the wrinkling might be reduced. I declined the request that we should reduce our flatbed charge (50p per image) to that of our bulk scanning service (10p). We part on a little less than great terms. You can't win them all, but you can tell yourself the customer is always right.