I’ve worked in schools for seventeen years. I’ve worked with a lot of copiers in that time.
The one we have at work right now? Is the worst.
It won’t change drawers if it runs out of paper! It has four drawers, and if it “auto-selects” drawer three for a document and drawer three runs out of paper, even if all the drawers are full it won’t just go ahead and use one of the other drawers! Not only that, but you can’t tell it to switch drawers. You can only cancel the job, or load the drawer.
And you know what else? “Auto-select” always chooses the drawer with the least amount of paper. Always.
If you don’t put the paper in properly–fan it, wobble it, stand it up and let it bend and put it in bend-y side down–it will jam. It will jam because, at the very end of the process before it drops the paper onto the finished tray, it slides the paper on top out and back on the paper before it. If that slide catches (and it does, lots!) then it jams up all the way through the copier.
Sometimes the feeder just wants to be a jerk. You stick the original in, the green light comes on indicating it knows the original is there, you hit start, and it spits out twenty-eight blank pages, never having touched your original.
No one but me is allowed to open the copier for any reason. It’s the crankiest machine I’ve ever dealt with, I tell coworkers, and we all rely on it. Let me do it. I load all the paper, I unjam all the jams, and when it’s being a complete jerk for no reason, I glare at it while people make copies, to make it behave for them.
When the damn thing is being particularly obnoxious, I tell coworkers,”only I’m allowed to touch it, because if it dies I want to be the one who killed it.”
Unrelated, I think some of the new people are a bit frightened of me.
Today, though…no, Friday. Friday that @#$%^& ran out of toner. No problem, I always keep a spare on hand. Only–the company had sent me the wrong one, and I didn’t notice.
Argh.
So we were without the big copier for Friday afternoon, all of Monday, into today… I have a small(er) color printer that only I can use, but it does make copies. So people have been using that, sending me the digital stuff so I could print it, making copies, dealing.
Telling me at least three times an hour that the big copier was still down.
Yeah. I know.
Finally today the new toner arrived. I nearly kissed the UPS delivery driver, danced my way to the copier and opened the access door.
Friends, there was a little puddle of toner on the inside of the door. I had not left it like that. I rarely have toner spills, and I certainly don’t leave them.
Someone had opened my copier. Someone had attempted to fix my copier, and now it had more error messages. (Despite the error message REPLACE TONER! What the hell did they think they were going to do, magically create more toner??)
I cleared all the jobs that had stacked up. I reset the print cartridge, changed the toner, refilled the staples while I was there, talked nicely to it, and stood back.
It asked me to change the toner. I restarted it. It went through the whole twenty minute restart (argh!) and then it asked me to change the toner. I called service.
And then I went back to my desk and sent a message to the school that we still didn’t have a copier because someone touched it.
I spent the rest of the day stalking the halls looking for someone with black smudges on their fingers.
Don’t touch my copier.