Gretag Imaging Archives

When I heard the San Diego Chargers were moving to Los Angeles, I thought they would be the Los Angeles Clippers of the NFL. Just another San Diego team moving to Los Angeles. They obviously wanted the benefits of having one of the greatest cities in the world as its base of operations.

I also thought it was strange for Los Angeles to go from not having an NFL team for twenty years to suddenly having two teams, the Rams and the Chargers.

Are the Chargers the Clippers of the NFL?

In my mind, I couldn’t shake the idea that the Chargers were just like the Clippers. I hate the Clippers with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns.

I was wrong. The Chargers are not like the Clippers. First of all, the Chargers are not forever linked to a racist owner. They also never announced the former racist owner’s wife, a racist in her own right as their official number one fan.

Something else that sets the Chargers apart from the Clippers is the Chargers are good.

The Chargers went into to Kansas City last night and beat the Chiefs 29-28 to clinch a playoff spot and tie the Chiefs for first place in the AFC West, but not really. Both teams are now 11-3, but the Chiefs get a slight advantage because they have a better in-division record.

Los Angeles’ other NFL team, the Rams, have a record of 11-2. They stand alone at the top of the NFC West.

I wanted to get behind the Rams after it was announced they were leaving St. Louis for Los Angeles. I just couldn’t do it. As a kid, it bugged me the Rams moved from Los Angeles to Anaheim. Then, years later, they moved to St. Louis. They ended up winning a super bowl, something they never could do in Southern California.

It looks like the Los Angeles Chargers are legit good - Bent Corner — Jeff Fisher (Photo: Andy Clayton-King/AP)

Then, when they moved back to LA, they had Jeff Fisher as their head coach. I cannot express how much I dislike Fisher and his stupid mustache. His creepy smile has been known to cause women to go into immediate menopause and turn holy water into vinegar.

St. Louis is a terrible place

There was another problem I had with the Rams: they still have that St. Louis stink on them.

I’m not a big fan of St. Louis. I’ve been there a few times when I worked as a field service engineer for Gretag Imaging. They were a Swiss company that made photo-finishing equipment. I can say St. Louis was one of the worst places I ever been. It was like the entire city was on the bad part of town. I once stopped at a grocery store to buy Tylenol and I feared I was going to get robbed. Not by other shoppers, but by the people working there.

The best thing about St. Louis is the giant arch. The best way to see it is driving Interstate 70 making sure not to stop.

I probably could have gotten behind the Rams if when they fled Southern California, they went anywhere else other than St. Louis.

The Chargers, unlike the Rams, have no stink upon them. The moved to LA from San Diego, but the Chargers played their first season (1960) in the AFL in Los Angeles. They moved to San Diego before the AFL 1961 season.

In conclusion

The Chargers give past and present Los Angeles residents an alternative team to support. Even though I haven’t lived in the Los Angeles area for over 34 years, I still keep a fondness for the area’s sports teams. It’s where I grew up. Unlike the Rams, I can get behind the Chargers. I’m glad they came to their senses and left Northern Tijuana and returned home to LA where they belong.

Word on the street is that Eastman Kodak is preparing to file for bankruptcy. The company is massively in debit and has run out of ways to generate income. They are trying to establish themselves into the home printer business, but other companies have a much stronger foothold in that particular market.

Kodak spends hundreds of millions a year on healthcare and pension benefits for retirees. If they go through bankruptcy, they may be able to lessen that cost. The pensions would be secured by the U.S. government’s Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. The retiree healthcare would not be protected and the bankruptcy court could allow Kodak to get out of its obligation to provide health care to retired workers.

I used to work in the photofinishing industry. First in a large central processing lab as a repair tech and then as a field engineer for Gretag, a Swiss company that made photofinishing equipment. I traveled around the eastern United States installing and repairing photofinishing equipment, mainly photo printers.

Gretag went out of business years ago, and rightfully so. To say Gretag wasted money is an understatement. They once sent me to Hannibal, Missouri to watch a guy replace a mini-lab wash tank at a Walgreen drugstore. I didn’t work on mini-labs. My boss had me go there simply because he didn’t have anything else for me to do that week.

It’s impossible to work in the photofinishing industry and not have any interactions with Kodak. They, under the name Qualex, owned most of the large central photofinishing labs in the country.

I was with Gretag when they purchased Kodak’s CLAS wholesale photographic printer business. Gretag sent me and five other lucky people to Rochester for a month of training on the CLAS printer. The former Kodak engineers training us weren’t very excited to all of a sudden to be working for Gretag, not that I could blame them.

The CLAS printer was an awful machine to work on. They were constantly breaking down. The only reason Kodak was able to sell them was because they owned most of the photo labs in North America. They also practically gave them away to other labs so that these labs would be forced to purchase Kodak paper. Every sale of a CLAS printer came with a contract for photo paper.

Gretag didn’t sell photo paper, so perhaps owning a line of printers designed to help sell paper wasn’t the wisest business decision.

I left Gretag in 1999. I wish I could say I left because I could foresee that film-based photography was on the way out. That wasn’t the reason. I just got sick of the needless, stupid travel. The night I woke up in my hotel room and couldn’t remember what city I was in, I knew then it was time to start looking for a new job.