Glorified Monkey

So, there is a part of my job that involves printing letters to students.

A LOT of letters.

All at once.

On a tight deadline.

These letters are generated at another location and sent to my printer remotely. I have now participated in this process twice, and I can now say with complete authority that every time, something (or multiple somethings) goes wrong.

I will spare you with the details of the comedy of errors that occurred this time (over multiple days) and favor you with my favorite train wreck.

Once I finally got the letters printing, one group kept coming out on two sheets of paper, when it should have fit on one. With more than 1,000 letters shooting out of my printer, I didn't want to be accused of singlehandedly cutting down the entire rain forest, so I tried to cancel the print job and re-run it.

It sounds easy, right?

Unfortunately, because it is sent remotely, the only way to cancel it is to hit the little orange button on my printer. Usually, these particular jobs are sent over in batches. So, pushing the button once cancels an entire group of letters from printing.


But since this is me we're talking about, that didn't happen. The universe always likes to throw me curve-balls, just to see if I'm paying attention.

In this case, all of the letters came over as individual print jobs. That meant that to cancel the 1,000+ letters, I had to hit the cancel button 1,000+ times.

In between each button press, I also had to wait while the printer processed my command. As a result, I spent my afternoon doing the following:

"Press"

... pause ...

"Press"

... pause ...

"Press"

... pause ...

"Press"

I felt like one of those chimpanzees trying to get into the space program at NASA.