'Nine Ways to Bore Yourself with a Photocopier'

Nine Ways to Bore Yourself with a Photocopier

By Brian K White at 04/20/2007 12:20

Of all the things in your work-a-day office environment, nothing is as ubiquitous as the photocopier, unless of count you count your chair, desk, stapler, and perhaps the conspicuous lack of window you have. It would be delightful to find a way to entertain yourself with the photocopier, but that may be a dream just out of reach. In the mean time, consider instead the more likely possibility that you can daily bore yourself with this very same device.

What follows are just a few of the many, great ways.

• 1 – Photocopy non-nude photos, specifically uninteresting ones, specifically of the blurry, grainy and indiscernible varieties.

• 2 – Print out the office betting pool on the latest professional or college game. Though it's obviously against company policy, don't' worry, you won't get fired unless your 16th-seated team unexpectedly charges at the end, putting you on top, winning you the full $126 pool. Sure, this will forever label you as the proto-typical office gambler slash cheater, and thief of work time, productivity and office supply value. Hey, no one said being a winner is easy.

• 3 – Use your photocopier to replicate the rules to fight club, but remember, the first rule is that we never talk about fight club

• 4 – Make infinite copies of the photos of your kids, pets, yard and car, no matter how blurry, gray and dark they may be. Bearing in mind that nobody will ever be able to see what you've copied, these will indeed be exceptionally boring photocopies.

• 5 – Use the photocopier (or network printer) to "accidentally" print the manifesto… it doesn't matter which manifesto, honestly. Once it's got "manifesto" in the title, and it's caught by the IT guys, you're pretty much doomed professionally.

• 7 – Catch "MF Tray Jam", but don't correct it. This will obviously inflame the whole office who needs their L2, P1 and other such tray-things duly printed. They'll assume someone can fix it, unaware that you already know that P1 Jam feed error U4 tray feed correct, please remove, which you adamantly refuse to do… you wily dog, you. How boring indeed!

• 8 – In a pinch, you can use it as a paperweight. It's overkill, sure, but just think of the amount of paper you can secure from even gale force winds with a several hundred pound photocopier. By the way, when I said, "in a pinch", I meant that it could pinch off even an entire limb of yours, properly dropped upon a section of your body, as it is precisely "a pinch" indeed.

• 9 – If your job seems too pointless to bear, consider making tens of thousands of copies of blank sheets of paper. It won't run through the toner cartridge, so you won't have to deal with that, but you might find some relief in mixing it up a bit. Consider the difference between single sheets of nothing compared to 50-page, collated sheets of nothing. That ought to make the work day just fly right by.