It's Game Day

Today is the Sunday before class starts. Out there in the world you might not know this, but the day before class starts is game day. Not everyone gets to play the game. Mostly its just faculty and a few put upon graduate assistants. Even many of them don't get to play because there is often a line and only one person can play at a time. Also, unless the person in question is a true game novice, then when the first person loses nobody else gets to play for at least a day.

This is a game I really don't like. But I have to play every semester if I am to properly do my job.

What is the game you ask? Well I will tell you. I have chosen to call the game "Copier Roulette."

Here's how it works:

You come in to school when there's nobody around and you complete your documentation for the first day of class. So this is a syllabus - something that here at CMU explodes up to 7 or 8 pages that want to be copied, two sided, collated, & stapled. Then with that there are often first assignments that have sheets. Of course this is just in my world. In other worlds there are even bigger things to be copied. The Colloquium people seem to xerox nearly an entire library each semester these days, and there are always PMs and SMs churning out schedules, memos, and even scripts.

But I digress.

The gambling comes in by when you decide to make your copies. The further out you are, the better your odds of winning. Winning in this case would be represented by coming back to your office with everything copied, collated, and stapled. There are various degrees of losing. Sometimes you get your copies, but you have to collate and staple. Sometimes you get nothing. If you come in a week in advance, the odds are heavily in your favor. If you come in on Monday close to class time, your odds very nearly approach zero.

Really your odds are good pretty much up until the end of business on the Friday before. After that, there's a pretty steep curve until class time.

The reasons for failure come in all shapes and sizes too. It's possible there may just be a long line, or you could wind up behind one person with a big job to run. Then there are the old standbys - out of paper (which you can hedge against), out of staples, and out of toner (which can not be prepared for). The real culprit though is the paper jam.

There are a range of paper jam failures as well. Back in the day I really saw this range as wide, but I have since become jaded and they all seem the same. The grand-daddy of all of these failures is the "call key operator." I am sure when the race of humans is finally destroyed, a machine with a display reading "call key operator" will be involved. This is the double zero of copier roulette, the house always beats you and there's nothing you can do.

Somewhere short of that disaster is the best thing to find next to an unoccupied, working machine. Occasionally you have the good fortune to come upon a jammed machine that was fouled by an unsophisticated user. Then you might have to only add paper, or clear one little jam and then run your whole job. It's rare, but when it happens it is fantastic. Probably the most depressing incarnation of the paper jam failure is the "every other copy" failure. This is one where the machine works perfectly for a single copy and then jams. Once you clear it you get another perfect copy and then another jam, and another, and another. I used to have the patience for this, but no more.

Almost equally depressing is the "hidden scrap." This is what happens when the machine says there is something to be cleared but to save your life you would not be able to find it. You follow the numbers, manipulate the controls, probe away at the thing, close everything up, only to be told that you haven't found the little piece of lint it is grousing about. I used to have the patience for this as well, but yet again, no more.

So this is game day, and I am hoping that when I go to copy that I have a clear machine, but who knows.

There are contingency plans. Truth be told, only Monday's syllabus has to be ready for Monday. This time around I have one I don't need all the way until Friday - although the odds don't improve much as the week goes along. I also have a key to the other copier. But as the second copier is not as robust as the first, once the primary machine goes down, the backup isn't usually that far behind. Sometimes you can just bite the bullet and run all of the copies you need out of the printer. But that's just bad form, and of course leaves you with a fairly massive collating and stapling job. I've also got a company card, so I guess in the very worst case I could go to Office Depot and have them copy it. I'm not sure if that changes anything though - just moving into another league. We can't be the only people starting up Monday.

Perhaps this will be the semester I offer all documentation as .pdf files from my web directory. That'd moot the whole thing.

But where's the thrill in that?