Dianphus

Sisyphus was compelled to roll a huge rock up a steep hill, but before he reached the top of the hill the rock always escaped him and he had to begin again (1. Odyssey, xi. 593). Accordingly, pointless or interminable activities are often described as Sisyphean.

Yeah. No shit "pointless or interminable activities" are often described as Sisyphean? Sounds like government work to me.

Today, they finally fixed the main copy machine. For now. The !@#$%ers . They come in , they take it apart, they call their supervisor, they miraculously “find” a bit of paper or a fragment of staple or a smudge of adhesive and they proclaim the copy machine fixed and hector us on our continued poor office keeping - it is always us it’s never the machines fault it’s broken. We suck and the poor yiddle copy machine is just doing the best it can.... Sometimes it is the effects of humidity sometimes it the use of recycled paper - the newest copy machine bogeyman. Whatev.

I have a huge copy request waiting. Huge. Enormous. I have not been able to make much headway on it because of the endless copy machine issues. The request was on my shelf hissing rather venomous things at me every time I had to walk past it. Nasty, mean, untrue things. Hateful request. The request and I were about to come to blows when I got another request. Bigger, meaner and even less finished because I haven’t started on it yet. They sit there and stare at me. And grow.

Today I started to make headway. I started at 7:15 am on the lesser, slower machine down the hall. It was a tedious process and the progress was slow - slow but progressive. The pile of paper seemed to be shrinking.I was wrong. It was wasn’t shrinking it was rearing back to pounce. Those of you who don’t think inanimate objects can have intent? have never worked in a filing room. I’m copying and copying and copying and copying and showing assorted RNs how to make double sided copies and copying and copying and copying at the slow, inefficient, noisy machine for hours.

Finally The Man came to fix the machine! We danced, we sang, we lay palm fronds at his feet. We swore up and down we would never (again) put sheets of paper with fresh white out applied into the machine! We would also never, ever, ever try to make copies of labels (again) - because that would be bad, we also never , ever would even think of letting sticky notes run through the mechanism of the copier (eight to twelve times a day - again). Nope. Not us. Never. Because those things would be are totally not compatible with copy machine life.

This was a senior copy machine guy. He pulled the machine away from the wall!. He told us if they had to come out to fix the machine again He would call management at the copy machine company and then he mumbled something dark about “RICO statues” but I think he was kidding because I don’t think, no matter what a pain in the ass a broken copy machine is and trust me, my ass is pained - I don’t think paper jams, even multiple jams over a prolonged period of time really count as racketeering.

So. Copy Machine fixed ( the crowd goes wild) and so I made copies and copies and copies and copies and copies and copies and I was sure the huge stack of paper must be shrinking...

And it wasn’t. It was exactly the same at 11:30 as it was at 7:15.

So I went to lunch and when I came back I filed. As the pile of copying failed to decrease the pile of filing increased. I am Sisyphus. So I filed and filed and filed and filed and then I went and copied and copied and copied and copied and tomorrow I will copy and copy and copy and copy and take a deep breath and start again because I got another request...


Edited to add : We Won