TGIF

Along about the same time my desk drawer-slidey keyboard thingy was giving up the ghost on Wednesday, our copy machine also was having problems. My favorite use of my degree is unjamming copy machines. I think that is why I went to college. I should have gotten my RN. RNs do not unjam copy machines nor or they able to tell anyone else that a jam had occurred. I learned this at the nursing home. I never met a nurse who could copy as much as a receipt with out leaving the copy machine jammed. Love them, angels of mercy one and all - but they all slept through the lecture of office machine maintenance during their management classes. A fax machine with an empty paper drawer can make a grown nurse weep. I’ve seen it happen. I worked with a DON (the biggest RNs of them all) who was not capable of putting paper into a copy machine. She would email another department head to let them know that the nurse management copy machine needed paper and could the other department head “do something” about it.

The other department head earned her place in heaven resisting her urge to stuff the DONs ‘do into the machine.

The repair guy we ordered came today, not the repair guy we ordered for my desk - I would have fallen over from the shock… I wonder if workers comp would pay for timely repair related injuries. What would I write on the form “They came to fix my desk right after I asked them too and the shock propelled me over and I hit my head on the corner of a three drawer file cabinet” … I’m sure they’ve seen it before. I know they’ve seen worse. When I was a temp at a workers comp insurance office I saw a report of an animal control person who filed for workers comp after she got bit by a snapping turtle while wading through a pond to rescue a drowning dog. In the rain.

I just noticed that my desk chair is too low. It’s an older model so it doesn’t have one of those air spring things like the new ones do. I think that once upon a time, perhaps during the Truman administration, that to raise and lower the height of the seat, you turned it. I don’t think it does that anymore. In my research as to how to make the chair more height appropriate, I did find out my chair was produced by the Boling Co. , in Siler City, now of Mount Olive. They no longer make my office chair. For good damn reason.

My keyboard was tippy but I fixed it.

What else can I complain about? While the guy was here to fix our copy machine he found, in about three seconds, the missing scrap of paper that we searched for fruitlessly. He laughed. He might have been laughing but he was the only one on his knees in front of a copy machine.

One guy, one copy machine and he managed to spread out all over the office. He also spent most of his no doubt charged by the hour time pacing around outside the building talking on his cell. He managed to make a two second unjamming take three hours and he took the entire machine apart. He left little piles copy toner over every flat surface and he was looking longingly at our desks. We wondered what he would have done in a small space.

The machine is all clean though, I know because every time I tried to get on the phone he started up his vacuum. It made for such a pleasant working environment, it was lucky that I was only trying to listen to messages from our crazier brother and sisters on the office answering machine. I would hang up the phone and he would stop vacuuming and I would pick up the phone and he would start his vacuuming again. It’s a small machine; there is only so much space that is available for vacuuming. He did though. Every damn inch. There isn’t a corner of that machine that wasn’t free of paper dust.

For about two minutes and then of course the machine stopped working again.