Battle....

Have you ever seen the movie Michael? You know the one with John Travolta as Michael the Archangel. Today I had a vision of John Travolta standing in a field preparing to “battle” a bull. I had the urge to do a little “battle” myself. Unfortunately it was me against a machine. A massive copy machine that is roughly the size of about 6 twin bed mattresses stacked on top of one another.

I was given a simple assignment today that turned in to an all out war. I needed to make copies of a document. A 113 page (one-sided) document needed to become a 57 page (double sided) document. Then I needed to make 85 stapled copies of said 57 page document. How difficult can it be? The beast that lives in the mail room should have been able to do it all in one fell swoop. Right? Right!

Well it started off well…copy was changed to double sided and things were progressing. Okay, okay we hit a little snag when it only stapled every other copy but I dealt with that I brought in my own stapler to staple the copies myself. Minor skirmishes along the way but nothing that I could not overcome. The real trouble began after about 50 copies; things started to jam in the machine. No problem. I cleared the jams and started over. I have to give this battle to the machine, it ate only about 4 copies that I had to then shred. I only had just over 35 copies left. I was calm. It has only taken me 2 hours so far. After the final jam….it would not clear. I checked everything. I was only at 60 copies and my patience was wearing a little thin. The mail room was hot, the machine was loud and I was bored, I had to stand by this beast because I could not leave confidential documents unattended. The desire to kick this monster was getting stronger. Finally I shut off the machine and started it again. This seemed to work. I got a whopping 13 copies before the final battle started. All of a sudden it started mixing up my pages. The feeder was all messed up. Pages were getting bent; things were getting out of order. The first time I calmly reordered the pages and started again. The second time I made a copy of each specific page that was bent, one at a time, so that it would not get stuck in the feeder, reorder the pages and started again. But the third time the papers exploded out of the machine. Literally; everything is out of order and a mess. I wanted to lower my head and charge it just like Michael in the movie. But before I lost my temper with an inanimate object I waved the flag of truce. I am ashamed to admit that the machine won. I will finish my last 13 copies on Monday when it is a slightly less temperamental mood. Hopefully the weekend will give it time to cool off and not hate me. J