Thursday, May 5, 2011

You wouldn't dare!

At work, I was requested to do some research on a subject. I had spent quite a bit of time looking for the information requested and was only able to find one relevant reference to what was asked. I sent the document off to print right away as it was close the time I would normally be leaving work.

I rushed into the printer room and when I checked the printer, I saw a huge stack of printing coming off. I inwardly groaned as the paper was legal size, colour and double sided to boot. I checked the page numbers... even worse than I thought. 156 of 203. I then looked at the list of print jobs. It would be est 4 minutes until it reached mine as there was another unfortunate sole behind this monster print job and in front of me. 

A lady wandered in, inquiring as to if her print job had been completed yet, she was the owner of the 203 pages. It was still waiting to finish. She mentioned she normally prints at the other end of the floor, however that printer was out of toner (no wonder when you print the size document she had). She mentioned she had toyed with the idea of taking the toner out of the printer I was standing by so she wouldn't have to walk all the way down here for her printing.

Inwardly I daring her to try and see how far she got before someone caught her. And pictured different evil ideas  I'd want to do to someone who would do something so petty. Just then the printer randomly decided to take a break from printing for a few minutes, I think it was it's own way of protesting the print job.

She then scrolled through the list of print jobs, as she had apparently sent a second item to print and wanted to see where it was. She noticed that were about 5 documents ahead of hers, mine included. Then she said, "Well I am supposed to be going home in about 2 min, but I guess I'll won't delete the other print jobs, I'll just wait my turn."

With this I envisioned giving her a clothesline to the throat followed by a flying elbow (I remember those from watching 80s wrestlying with my Grandfather when he was alive) after that comment, as there was no way I was going to allow someone to delete my print job after waiting for so long.

Her mammoth print job finally came to a halt and she excitedly grabbed it off the printer. Only to discover it had not printed in book fashion as she had wanted. I think she must have seen my eyes shooting death rays in her direction as she quickly followed up with, "But I guess I can deal with this and make it work." 

A couple of minutes later my print job finally was spit out of the printer, quickly followed by her second print job. I pulled her pages off of mine and handed them too her. The first page of her print job was a letter size picture of a little girls' face, in full colour of course. She quickly snatched the pages from my fingers and said, "Don't look at that!" Then rushed away to her desk.

Not sure what was more maddening, the fact that her monster print job that should have taken 4 minutes from my arrival took closer to 10, or that she had threatened to delete other people's legitimate work print jobs for her own personal non-work related printing just so she could leave work on time.

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