Caution: Geniuses At Work

First time? Start here. Read "The Primer" and follow the link at the end. Chronological order makes more sense for the stories.

Today we'll touch on some of the technical every day difficulties that I get to see at the office. The type of thing that happens over and over again to the point that its so common I truly forget how deep seeded the boobery I have to deal with truly is. Let's just get to it.

Scenario #1: At one point we had a good fax machine. Somewhere between the rampant idiocy and the drooling state of office affairs, Female Boss decided to buy a "new" one for no fucking apparent reason. The old one worked fine, had no problems and was easy to work with.. hence, good.

Female Boss ends up finding a deal in the newspaper for a fax machine, $20 used. She jumps on this deal like a hobo heaving herself on a nickle. Still miffed at the whole transaction I jump at the opportunity to take the old machine and give it to a friend of mine.. but let's talk about what Female Boss brought in the office. This "new" machine is probably from the 80's. It doesn't even use ink! It uses a roll of toner for crying out loud! That odd carbon paper shit! I don't think I have seen something that prints using a sheet of black carbon, or whatever the fuck it is, since my dad's "cutting edge" word processor he bought back in '83.

The current problem, aside from finally locating a vendor that still sells the bulky toner cartridges, has been both Boss' ability to fax effectively. After about two faxes, I figured out that this stupid fuckin machine can only handle about two pages in the feed tray at a time. So rather than being productive you have to babysit the stupid thing as you fax multi-page documents.. one goes thru and is starting to read the next, you then put the next page in the tray, rinse and repeat till you are done. Total pain in the ass but hey it was such a great deal at $20, right whore?

After several uses, Female Boss has totally abandoned trying to send faxes and makes me do it for her. She doesn't understand the concept of feeding individual pieces of paper into the tray even after I have explained it to her and showed her how to do it, seriously, about a half a dozen times. As for Male Boss, things are much more interesting. Taking the typical word of advice and caution to the wind, I constantly get to see Male Boss loading the fax machine with 10, 15, 20 sheets of paper at a time.. all resulting in a monstrous paper jam.

Male Boss' reactions include: screaming, hitting the fax machine, questioning Female Boss' decision to purchase a new fax machine in various ways, such as, "When the fax machine works, you buy the new one? How fucking stupid you are?", yanking the cord out while the fax machine squeals in pain and asking me questions like, "Why he takes all of them," he being the fax machine, all of them referring to the 33 pieces of paper he wants to fax that took him a good 5 minutes to cram into the paper tray resulting in his 29th paper jam to date.. and that's since I started counting about a month or so after Female Boss bought it early last year. If only the contraption had some exposed wiring or something it'd be even more entertaining.. nothing like a little voltage running thru the ticker every time you're an idiot.

Scenario #2: This one is a short one but still as mind numbingly stunning as any other. It involves a conversation with Female Boss wanting to print a document. She had downloaded it via in-mail and saved it to her desktop.

"Hey Northe, can I print this document?"

Are you fucking kidding me, "Yes."

"Ok, I want to print it."

I refuse to waste my breath.

"Ok, so.. I go to print. Hey, but wait, Northe, its like 30 pages."

I still don't say anything. What's the point really? All we are waiting for is the big payoff so what quicker way to get there by just letting her continue to snowball?

"Well, what I'm saying is I want to print it but I don't want to print the 30 pages."

"You want to print the whole thing?"

"Yes," she answers.

"But you don't want to print the whole thing?"

"Yes," she answers again.

If only I was Billy Crystal in Mr. Saturday Night.. you see what I did there?