When photocopying some journal articles in the Biomedical Library on Saturday afternoon, I was happily minding my own business. While making good progress in cutting back the list of “articles to get”, in the same room at me at one point though, was a (roughly) 30yo female doing battle with her photocopier.

Each time she would press the button to make a copy, she would watch it carefully as it was spat out of the machine, then look at it, make a noise of disappointment, crumple it and throw it into the bin. I watched her do this five or six times, then decided to help because she was trying to shrink a book with two A4 pages down to one A4 page, and she was just wasting money.

SPOTD: “I’m trying to get two pages down to one but it’s not working properly.”

I went to adjust the settings for her, to make it do what she wanted, and then noticed that all the settings were correct.  I told her this, and repeated the machine was not working properly, then placed the book into the photocopier to demonstrate.

Pressing the copy button, the machine whirred to life and spat out a perfect copy, with the two pages shrunken to one, exactly as she wanted. I couldn’t see the problem, and said so.

She gave me a look of disgust at my lack of help.

SPOTD: “but it’s coming out upside-down!”

Sure enough, the piece of paper was coming out of the copier facing away from her, and it had not occurred to her that all she needed to do was to turn the piece of paper around. Trying not to laugh, I advised her that all she needed to do was to turn the book around in the photocopier, and then her pages would come out the right side up.   She suddenly brightened since that thought had not occurred to her, and spun the book around in the photocopier, pressing the copy button again. Out spat a copy the right side up, and she was smiling with happiness that I had indeed been able to solve her photocopying problems.

Me (demonstrating): “Or you could simply turn the page around…”

The look on her face was priceless as it finally sunk in she’d been throwing pages out needlessly. I returned to my photocopier in a fit of hysterics, and although she had several journal articles left to photocopy, she scooped them up and fled in embarrassment about twenty seconds later.

One of the funniest entrants for SPOTD that I’ve experienced in a long time…

Categories: SPOTD