The Scarlet Copier

Would this make me a citizens’ hero or just a jerk?

Being at the office a week after Christmas allows you to get done a lot of the administrative crap you had been putting off for much of the year (or write an extra Wednesday blog, as it were.) Now I hate leaving my desk. If I can get something accomplished by e-mailing or calling a co-worker, or by coming up with an innovative calculation solution without venturing outside my cubicle, I’m super-happy. But there are a few things that require me to leave my comfy confines, and in La Semana de Administración, photocopying is going to make me vacate the premises.

I hate the Xerox machine and all it stands for.

But at the same time, I do not enjoy office small talk enough to volunteer to keep the giant business-sized copy machine in my OWN cube for all to use. So, heading off to the copier in the department kitchen is an inevitability. And what I’ve managed to hold off for 51 consecutive weeks has reached its breaking point. It’s just me, my machine, and a stack of papers that can no longer remain singular.

It should only be that easy.

Having the copy machine in the kitchen has long provided me with amusement. Because of the sensitivity and the cost of such an apparatus, the Reprographics Coordinator for the building has placed a “NO FOOD OR DRINK” sign right over it, in hopes that people will not 1) spill anything on the machine and 2) make photocopies of their ham and cheese sandwiches. I stared at this sign for over two years, and I have always abided. But about a month ago, I thought it would be much funnier if the “NO FOOD OR DRINK” sign should reside on the front of the fridge. That is how to confuse your co-workers. It’s like putting a NO PAPER PLEASE on the laser printer. Way funnier.

The sign has since been returned, and there’s little I can do to entertain myself while the neon green light makes my paperwork double the size. All I have to hope for is that the machine works properly, and I’m in and out of there before I do something crazy like put goldfish in the watercooler. As I step up to the plate, the computer screen on the copier says what I fear most –

JAM IN SECTIONS 2,3, and 6.

Just then, a tumbleweed blew across the kitchen.

As I had outlined in the Seven Deadly Office Sins, Reprographic Sloth is when somebody jams the machine and then sneaks off into the shadows hoping they will never be found out. But as I rolled up my sleeves and was forces to twist my arm so that it bent in seven place to retrieve the loose crumpled copy, I soon found it wasn’t going to be anyone’s lucky day.The accordion-ed sheet was a copy of an e-mail that someone had printed off of Microsoft Outlook. The content was meaningless to me, but it did give me joy in its other chief aspect – the culprit’s name is at the TOP OF THE PAPER. In the vein of Harford, I’ll protect the guilty and give that person an alias. We’ll call her Stone Cold Steve Austin.

So what do I do?

1 - Casually throw out Stone Cold’s email, and grant clemency?
2 – Confront Stone Cold and have it out with her?
3 – Magnet it to the fridge for all to see?

Readers of YAB, help me please. WWCD?