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Tuesday, September 20, 2005

the machines hate me

I hate to write posts that sound like tributes to my own stupidity so let me preface this post about my stupidity with the disclaimer that I am not stupid about many types of things. I am a good reader, for one, and particularly good when it comes to literature. Furthermore, I am a fast reader. So, there, I am a fast and good reader. I also have a certain je ne sais quois quotient when it comes to languages. And I am somewhat emotionally intuitive, as long as the emotions involved don't belong to me. But when it comes to office equipment I am pathetic. It took me years to learn how to use the office's last FAX machine and when I did the next day we got a new one that I've never mastered. I don't know how to use the coffee machine and have run out of people in the office I can pester to make coffee so I can have some. But the printer is the real problem because not only do I not understand how to use it, I need to use it on an hourly basis and it hates me. It randomly decides not to print and even if I kick it it still won't work. I have just spent 20 minutes trying to print a letter of recommendation for our outgoing intern on letterhead and no matter what I do it won't print it on letterhead; it just keeps churning it out on white paper, which I then put through the shredder. Now the shredder also has broken, for no apparent reason, as all I did was put paper in it to shred which is, after all, its freaking job. I won't even get started on the Xerox machine which, according to everyone else in the office, is an amazing machine that can collate, double-side copy and all sorts of other things, but won't even copy an entire page straight when I try to use it. We could say this is just about my own inability to understand systems, but I understand the Internet perfectly well, and I'm very computer saavy, so why can't I operate these freaking pieces of office equipment? Why does the postage machine always stop working when I touch it? Finally, is this related to the fact that watches always stop when I put them on?

postscript: have finally printed letter on letterhead by feeding letterhead into every available slot on printer simultaneously.