Spring Break
What is Central Dupe?
Printing business hidden within NCC
Perry Hebard
Issue date: 2/15/04 Section: News
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This is Central Duplicating, where machines hum, people scurry and photocopies are printed in the thousands. A steady stream of customers - most of them faculty - flows down the long corridor to Central Dup to drop off or pick up their orders at the counter
Jim Johnson presides over this operation, supervising a staff of three full-time employees and one part-timer. Sitting at his desk in a spacious sunlit office, he explains how he can print color photographs only minutes after taking them. A photo hobbyist, he is excited about the printing business.
The smell of fresh ink permeates the air in Central Dup, in the northwest corner of College Center, near the gym. The constant thrum and click of high-speed copiers fills the print works while the never-ending jobs are printed, collated and stapled.
Johnson's print shop, as he likes to call, contains four machines, including something called a Toko R2 press. John Sumerfield keeps a watchful eye on Toko R2 - an offset color press -- inspecting freshly printed color sheets as they pile up.
"He's the finest pressman we have ever had," Johnson says, explaining that Sumerfield's responsibility is to ensure that production flows without a glitch through the facility.
Completing job orders is a priority, but more important is "total customer satisfaction," says Johnson, whose official title is director of Duplicating.
His mission, he says, is to do whatever it takes to keep the faculty and staff happy and better able to their own jobs.
A balance must be struck. Completing the smaller jobs while fitting in the large orders can be an art, Johnson says.
The timeliness of the jobs is always the priority, he says. "We ask our faculty and staff to be honest and understanding when requesting a rush order. This way we can fit in the larger orders and keep our production moving."
An adjunct professor once told him that NCC's print shop was one of the best that the professor ever dealt with, Johnson says.
Central Dup has three levels of service: walk-up service in which jobs are printed immediately; standard interoffice mail orders in which work travels through the College's inter-office mail; and the larger scheduled jobs.