Ode to PMCO's Copy Machine

Today [Tuesday] was the day of the Student Advisory Board meeting, so that’s what I spent most of the day preparing for. I made sure I had a spreadsheet of all the contacts people had made asking for money, including my own and I basically figured out the value of the donations and thought about what I’d say. I also cleaned up all the extra versions of the same original spreadsheet of contacts I made that have been floating around the system for a while. I don’t know how that happened but it has been confusing trying to figure out what is up to date. But the extra ones are all deleted now, I think. I also printed out posters a SAB-er made for the gala to advertise, as well as a bunch of flyers. Tickets go on sale tonight, and now we get to promote it. I’m going to take a couple posters to Linworth at seminar tomorrow night, I guess.

So I suppose that it’s time for the long overdue “copy machine rant.” Not that I’ve really had anything to rant about before now, and not that this necessarily add up to much either, but I recall when I came in for my interview at ProMusica Jen mentioned that most students end up writing, among other things, a journal dedicated to the copy machine. I thought of that today when we were playing with it. So, I hereby dedicate this blog post to ProMusica’s copy machine/printer (It’s two in one!). No Joe (ticketing), I did not break it (as you accused).

Printing off all the flyers and posters was indeed a bit of a feat. I started with the flyers. The flyers were meant to be half a page, but we couldn’t make two print on one page through the computer. Instead, I had to copy two together in the copy machine to make them print on one page. I did this sideways the first time, and then I had trouble making it scan again. I wasted some paper. Then, after printing twenty of them, I looked at the notes I had taken and realized that not only did I want ten more, but I was supposed to have printed them on colored paper.
The shelf from which I would acquire colored paper is a bit of a mess. When I’ve been told to find anything from it before, I often spend a long to trying to find it, pick up the wrong thing anyway, and discover that what I was looking for was in fact right in front of me. So I needed to find 8 ½ x 11 pretty colored paper. It didn’t matter what color. I eventually chose yellow. It was thick cardstock, but I didn’t know whether there were any other choices, so I loaded it into the copy machine and told it to print 15 copies.

Well I guess I didn’t close the tray all the way, because the copier decided to print the flyers from the second tray instead—letterhead. So I wasted some more paper. I got the paper load properly and started again. I think that’s when Joe accused me of making a mess and breaking the printer. I was quite sure I had not yet succeeded in the latter, however. Indeed, I managed to print fifteen copies of the flyers on yellow paper. When I checked the tray though, I didn’t think there was enough paper for the other fifteen, so I went to get more yellow paper. I realized, when I got back, that even though I had found the same color, this was normal paper, not cardstock. I decided I didn’t care. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be using and was pretty sure I wouldn’t find the cardstock again. So I shoved more paper in the tray and printed the rest of the fliers.

The real fun, however, came when I wanted to print the poster. I could not find the right size of paper. Sure enough, when I decided on the one large loose leaf of paper that I saw to show Julia, it was the wrong size. There were, it turned out, maybe four sheets of 11 x 17 sheets of paper on the shelf. (That’s what I was looking for.) The rest were in the room I’ve been working in, in the filing cabinet right by my desk… not that I’d have any reason to know that, and Julia hadn’t thought of it until I asked. I decided to just ask Julia to figure out how to make the computer print the posters. I saw, when I asked it to print, that it was trying to format the picture as if it would print on normal paper, but that’s not what we wanted. Julia played with that for a while, and then decided to do it from her computer when it didn’t print right. We had to try that a few times too, but we finally got it and they’re really very cool. So that’s my fun printer story. I’m sure it was very exciting. It’s funny though, I noticed on Sunday when I was subbing as a teacher aid at my synagogue, that ProMusica has a nicer copy machine. What’s more, if I had wanted to do anything besides just make a regular copy, like if I’d wanted to copy several pages or make something front and back, I wouldn’t have known how—but I would at ProMusica! Not that it mattered; I just needed fifteen copies of one coloring sheet so I was set. Still, it actually kind of bothered me because I was fairly certain that those commands did exist on Beth Tikvah’s copier, I just didn’t know how to find them.