I love the copy lady. No, really, I do. She comes in a couple of times a week for a
few months every school year, and she does copying for us. She saves me valuable time by doing the
fighting with jammed machines while I can actually get work done in my
classroom. Love her.
Today, though, I don’t
know what the heck happens to her.
I have everything that I
need to have copied all ready to go. I
carefully print out little instruction papers – hole-punch this, single-side
that, 100 copies of this … -- and attach each carefully documented instruction
sheet to each original. Every time I do
this, I pray to the copy gods that the originals do not get lost or ruined or
messed up somehow. And usually this is a
successful strategy.
Usually.
Unfortunately, our printers
now have remote-copy access, which means that our printing jobs can be and
often are interrupted by people blindly sending jobs from their desk
computers. This would be a great system
if their jobs didn’t bump off the jobs of people actually in the copy room
using the machines.
This simple glitch sends
the copy lady into a frenzy today, and somehow she manages to take four copies
of one of my jobs, and she reassigns them into the to-be-copied pile, assuming
they are new jobs of some kind.
When I go to pick up my
box of copies, I realize it is heavier than I expected. It isn’t until I start separating the copies
into piles that I realize I have not 100, not 200, not 300, but 700 copies of a
graphic organizer for the students to use.
700. That’s almost a ream and a
half of paper just for this one document.
The good news is that I
might very well manage to use most of these organizers during the year, and, if
not, I can always use them next year.
And the year after that. And
probably even the year after that, and the next year, and probably even another
year, to boot.
I do love the copy
lady. She’s so good that she apparently got
some of my copying caught up through my next license renewal cycle. Seriously, though, without her, my life would
be infinitely more frustrating, as she is really patient with the jammed
machines. I just kick them. It may not unjam the works, but it sure does
make me feel better.
Now if I can just get over
the guilt of having her work extra-hard on my copy job that probably took her
an hour longer than necessary of absolutely unnecessary work, I might feel
better about this blog entry.
