A rumble. The giant beast awakens from its slumber…very slowly. Amid creaks and rattles, a backlit owl appears on the tiny screen, first asleep and then blinking its eyes to indicate its newfound wakefulness. The ECOSS copier’s day has begun. Well, sort of. Five minutes later, the machine has fully powered on and is ready to make its first copy of the day.
I’ve been hearing some of the young whipper snappers around here say something about a “blog” so I made it my business to find out just what in tarnation a blog is. Turns out it is NOT one of those hoity-toity Energy-Star® rated, color-printin’, 40-pages-per minute, high-and-mighty, over-achievin’ multi-function, multi-paper-size copiers who can make Petey-F’s. (Can someone explain how a “scanner” turns a regular old piece of 20-lb bond into a Petey-F? And while you’re at it, just what is a Petey-F anyway?) Luckily, I spend all day outside the break room, and I think I pieced enough conversations together to figure out just what this blog thing does.
And before y’uns go and start scratching your heads about just how an old copier like myself got his hands on a keyboard, nuts to you! I am holding one of the sustainable business coordinator’s copies hostage until she is done taking dictation. Turns out they don’t teach shorthand or typewriting in high schools anymore, but she seems to be keeping up. Are you getting all of this?! Word for word?! You’d better be, or this proposal will be in a permanent paper jam holding pattern, young lady!
There’s talk of replacing me and my old friend the phone system, if only the guys upstairs could figure a way to scrape enough change together to replace me. Toner as my witness, it will not happen. I ain’t retired yet, even if there are no more parts in existence to fix me, even if the company who made me back in 1862 doesn’t exist anymore, even if I am an embarrassment to these tree-huggers because of my brazen energy-inefficiency, and even if it takes seven tries, twenty minutes and four sheets of paper to make a single readable copy. I am old school, and I am not going anywhere. Me and my buddy the phone system ain’t going nowhere. Hopefully no bigshots catch wind that all these young Turks need to replace me with a younger, sleeker, faster and more efficient model is some cold hard cash. As long as no one finds out about that, I think I’ll live another fifty years or so in this old building, It’ll take at least that long to make the twenty copies my typist is waiting on, anyway.
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