Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Problems With a Copier

It's my job to do the bulletin for church on Sunday. Doing this involves creating the document in Microsoft Publisher on my computer at home, printing it and then copying it at church. Lately, however, I've been thinking that I should start doing the whole copying bit at home.

There's a reason, of course, that we do all the copying for the church at the church. For one thing the church buys it's own toner and paper for the copier, and if we copied the bulletin at home, we would be using our own. However, I'm beginning to wonder if it's really worth all the headaches of using a different copier, because every copier is different.

Take this example: I also print off email updates that we periodically receive from some of our missionaries, Gene and Carol. Last week we received three updates, one long one and two short ones.. These I printed off at home, but was in a rush to get to church I neglected to check what I was printing.

I got to the church and started copying. After I had printed the long update I put the two short one's together and started copying those onto the backside of the copies that I had just made. It was only after I had finished copying them that I discovered I had printed duplicates of one of the short updates at home, so I had just made a bunch of garbage copies.

I went home and printed the correct update, and rushed back to the church, now getting seriously pressed for time. I copied the long update using the top feeder on the copier, but I had to fold the two short updates so I could copy them on the same page. These I put on the scanner bed, since they wouldn't go through the feed.

I printed the updates, and then discovered that I had printed them so that the text on the opposite side of the page was upside down.

Now getting a little exasperated and seriously low on time, I printed them again, this time making sure that I put the paper in the correct way.

I then printed one side of the bulletin using the top feeder, and then put the pages in to copy the cover on the back. I did this, and it was only afterward that I realized I had forgotten to put the back page in the feeder, and instead had printed the two short updates.

I was now out of time, so I put the following text on one of the overhead slides that also scroll through with announcements: "We received three updates from Gene and Carol this week. Due to a technical difficulty, you can read two of them on the back of the bulletin."

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