Ready to copy, over and over again
I can now claim to be the guy that welcomed the new copy machines into our corporate world. That’s a small deal for the rest of you, but it shows how understaffed we are come Friday afternoons; I was actually mandated to watch for the truck and make sure that the delivery guys placed the machines in the right sector of the building. Given how important the photocopy is to the public service, there should have been a team of people waiting with open arms, instead of plain old me. After all, I rarely even use the contraptions.
We have just finished a multi-year lease on a large number of copiers, and the renewal required months of study by others in the department. I was not involved… until today, when I got to touch the “new iron” and wheel pieces here and there. I would have thought that this would be a red-letter day, given the concentration that the task has received. I mean, without copies, how would a civil servant ever prove that something took place, or that money had been spent? These are the cornerstone of the empire.
The two delivery guys were on task; late Friday afternoon with great temperatures does that. Nobody wants to hang about into the evening hours in the modern corporate world. They unboxed and triple-checked their delivery clipboards (surprisingly, no copies were made in the process). Then they unboxed the machines.
The truck had a really cool elevator tailgate; I think I’d want to spend a day or two just playing with that, if I worked in deliveries. The doors were opened wide and pinned back, and they found their delivery guy harness straps (very similar to the ones used by refrigerator delivery guys, so this might be a sign of their craft) in the stow bins near the rear of the truck box. Then – up, and down, and no crushed toes – and the photocopiers were in the building. The flourish of trumpets was strangely absent.
One of the machines had been damaged in transit, so a committee was struck to decide if the dents were properly noted on the manifest. The manufacturer has a technician that will fly in (I suppose) with replacement parts early next week, so the moment of stress disappeared, and harmony returned to our staging area. Oddly, the delivery guys were not interested in taking the old machines away, so we now have “way too many” copies of copy machines in our cramped quarters. Again, just a detail. Soon we’ll be making NEW copies of old documents, and the world will return to its preordained orbit.
