I am nothing. Gossamer. I am the magical vapors in the wake of the genie. I am a Techno-Shaman, rattling trackballs in a gourd and shaking my micro-screwdrivers at gremlins and w.o.m.b.a.t.s.
The printer/copier/fax machine out front is fucked. Its probably about five years old, as old as my 'career' in this place, and its currently experiencing the machine equivalent of multiple organ failure. The Scanner/copier flatbed is streaked with dirt or grease, and on the underside which i have no idea how to get to. It stopped scanning in color long ago. That is, it stopped scanning in proper colors. Every color scan comes out in shades of blue, and clear white streaks across the page. The little narrow pane of glass dedicated to the document feeder is spotless, but the document feeder itself needs help in doing its job. The rubber wheels are all gummy and rotting, and the runners have a tendency to grab several pages at a time, if they manage to grab any. What's most annoying is what happens when the USB cable is plugged into the machine, or when any activity is prompted by the attached PC. It'll start to go about its little checks:
Warming up scanner bulb. Checking arm track. Scanning to PC. And I'll hear it sort of droning and grinding and flexing those efficient little mechanical muscles. And then It'll Stop.
Error 79. Power off then back on.And it'll do that until I take a hammer to either the printer/copier/fax, or to my own head.
All this, you understand, is beyond my scope. I can't fix the electrical problem causing the 'Error 79'. I can't readjust the color sensors so that the scanner doesn't see everything in shades of cyan. I can't replace the gummy feeder wheels or tighten the treads on the tracks so that it knows how thick a single piece of paper is. I probably could take the flatbed apart, remove the glass pane and have it cleaned and polished, but I can't guarantee that I'll be able to put it back together again. I can't fix this thing. But no one wants to hear that.
"The copier needs servicing" I say to the woman. We'll call her the woman for now because you don't really need to know her name or what she does. All you need to know is that she's the one who is responsible for the printer/copier/fax machine and that I hate her, but I have to be civil to her because...well, because I'm civil to everyone.
"What copier.' She says and she peers out the window behind me at the machine she's pretending not to have ever known about.
'The (insert model number)."
"Oh, which one is that?'
Its at this point that I'm forced to segregate my internal dialogue and what I actually say. In my head I've already blown up. In my head I've walked out the room while flipping her the bird and gone back to something more worthwhile than talking to a halfwit about a machine that she purchased five years ago. In my head I'm holding her by the back of the neck and thumping her head against the glass while pointing and saying 'Its the fucking grey one!' I'm having this reaction now because I've had it before. Several times. Once when the streaks on the glass first appeared. Again when the scanner turned everything blue. Once as she stood there wondering why the copier was munching all five pages of her document at once and jammed, and she looked at me and said 'This is a scanner too?'. But I must be civil. I must be calm.
"The f...the grey one" I say. "Its been a while since its been serviced". In truth it has never been serviced. Never cleaned or updated or given the once over. "And its getting to the point where its malfunctioning more often than its actually functioning."
I know, dear reader, that it is now impossible for me to convince you that what I say is free from any superfluous embellishment. I've already admitted that I hate the woman, and you must be thinking that this is some frustrated tirade intended to unfairly paint her in a mocking light. It is, and yet it isn't. It is a frustrated tirade, I won't deny that, and I do hate the woman. But this is no embellishment. I am not painting her in any light other than the harsh fluorescence of reality. The reality is, when I said the words 'malfunctioning' and later 'functioning'; both words consisting of more than two syllables if you hadn't noticed, the woman paused. I could see in her furrowed brow that she was startled, as if she'd come across something hard and unpalatable in the lexiconic gruel that she was so used to consuming. She took a quick breath and looked, for an instant, as if she were about to stand up and inspect the machine herself for signs of this 'malfunkshuning' and I knew that she had forgotten how this conversation had even begun. Ever civil, I chose to remind her.
"So I think we should call the distributor and have it serviced.'
'Well whenever we call them they usually charge us.' She said, finally back on the right track. Sort of. 'And they'll want to take it away and then we won't have any copier.'
'We'll it'll only be temporary, and in the mean time we can use the other one in the back," The 'other one' belongs to man we shall call Mr. Good, because he's generally a good fellow, even when he's not. He doesn't work with us, except that he works in the same field and we share office space, and he's generally cooperative, well mannered, and
good. Its hard to explain really. He's apples, we're oranges, but we're all still just fruit. "Or you can use the little ones here to copy.'
At someone's behest, I'm still not sure who, several people in the office were given little desktop all-in-ones. It was a ridiculous move on several levels, but whats most ridiculous is that the people who were 'awarded' with these tiny printers/scanners/copiers procured in the name of efficiency are the type of people who do nothing for themselves.
They are the hills from which shit rolls down. They are monkeys ordering their own tails. They are gopher ranchers. Gopher this. Gopher that. But never gopher it your own damn self.
And so, saying 'You can scan and copy from the little printers' is sort of like saying 'You can wipe your own ass for a while, can't you?' Its not as if I didn't know this already. It was my very civil way of being a smart ass. The woman, the halfwit who can't remember that she's responsible for servicing the equipment which she bought, the equipment that I don't know how to service, knows this too. She is not as dumb as she pretends to be, and that annoys me even more. She fixes me with pursed lips, a furrowed brow, and fluttering eyelids which I already know precede a condescending smile, and she says to me.
"Just see what you can do."
What? Did you not understand what I just said? I've been 'seeing what I can do' for four years now! Oh, I'll tell you what I can do! What I can do is...What I can do...
My inner dialogue is out of gas. Resigned, I trudge outside, glare at the 'Error 79 message' and pick at the scraggly hairs in my beard. With no amount of grace I turn off the printer/copier/fax machine, unplug the USB cable from the computer, and turn the machine back on. There. I've done what I can do. Symptom cured. I've gotten rid of the cough so it can slowly die of pneumonia.
I'm a fucking quack.
