Saturday, October 06, 2007

One Day My Prints Will Come

Last week I was charged with printing out 720 CountryLink training manuals (CountryLink being the OZ equivalent of, say, Intercity). Truly, a job worthy of my talents. Each print run had 84 pages, so that was 60480 pages. It was 122,398 seconds of my life I wasn't going to get back.

So I invented a new game to entertain myself.

If it was a Japanese gameshow it would be called (adopts shouty/grunty Oriental voice): "Super-Printout-Treasure-Hunt-Charrenge!!!!!!!!!!!", accompanied by epilepsy-inducing flashing limegreen captions.

The game is thus: because it's too much for one printer to handle, and because people waiting for one piddly printout are held up by what appears to be an entire tree's worth of paper, I have to stagger the workload.

This means finding other random printers in random parts of the building, installing them on your PC and then sending your Bible Of Dross to print out possibly across the other side of the building. Of course it's not always obvious where these printers are. And so when your print is complete you can go on a little treasure hunt around the labyrinthine corridors looking for any printers with a two ton wodge of paper sat in its out tray.

Strictly speaking you shouldn't do this. Each department has been assigned a printer and has a discreet budget for paper and toner etc. and so today I got rumbled:


"Hi Philip

It appears that what you have been printing has turned up at our printer – level 4 south side facing the tracks.

As this is a large document can you please pick it up instead of reprinting the document.

In future please try to double side print large documents

Regards,
Ellena"

Note how the email is poilte, yet subtle in its recriminations.

"CountryLink"? More like "Cunt Really, Inc."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Without wishing to sound like a complete pedant, Countrylink is actually an NSW entity, not an OZ one. Other states have their own 'Intercity Equivalents'.

Sorry, I'll go back to reading my copy of 'Modern Railways' now shall I?

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