But I LOVE Office Depot!!!

Not tonight however. You would think that if someone runs a copy center as part of their business that there would be a reason to use their copy center. It is possible you might be wrong.

This evening I arrived at the school copier with a stack of papers that needed 2 into 1, 2-sided, saddle staple copying, pretty hard core. As usual I arrive at the copier to find the trouble display lit. It was out of toner. Being one of the few staff members undeterred by a copier trouble display I diligently looked for the toner so as to refill it. Of course, we had no toner.

At this point I say to myself that I didn't want to fold all of the output anyway, and dammit I have a company charge card, and I just LOVE Office Depot, and they do copies...

So I am at Office Depot, and the girl takes my stuff and they have two machines that will do this and so I think, Great, be done in a snap. That is until the first machine jams after only a few pages. It proceeds to do this every couple of pages, over and over. Now you might surmise that if the document requires 2 into 1, 2-sided, saddle stapling, that it might not be a very small document - and you would be right. I also had two different documents that needed this, and I needed 50 of each. So each time I heard the woman crack the case of the copier to pull out jammed pages I cringed just a little bit.

Then the other machine crapped out.

Now, I just LOVE Office Depot. Its like a little museum of office supplies to me, and I love office supplies. So while the copiers were doing battle with my documents I took the tour. I went through post-it land. I visited Avery-land. I went to see briefcases and laptops. I even stopped at clearance, it all took about 15 minutes. Then I went back to the counter to see how my job was running and there were less than 10 of each.

RRR. I am loving Office Depot less every minute.

Finally after about 45 minutes I tell her that 25 of each will have to do because I am getting old. She seems relieved as the manager came to pull her drawer and I think the job was looking like it was going to run past closing. To get to the 25 she had to finish one on one machine and then run the last four of the other on the same machine as the second copier had by now completely shit the bed.

Amazing.

In a million years I would not have thought that, had it been running, the copier at work would have been just as dependable and faster than the ones at the copy center. Astounding. I guess maybe I will have to learn to accept this flaw, like one does in any relationship.