Friday, August 20, 2010

Shirley you jest.

I’m going to be heading in to school soon.  We aren’t required to go in today, and I wasn’t planning on it.   But yesterday the secretary came on over the P.A. around 2:00 to announce that the big copier had run out of toner.  If we needed anything copied for Monday we would have to do it ourselves on one of the little machines.

We ran out of toner?  The first week or school?  It’s not like she’s new, and had no idea that one of the busiest weeks for the copier is this week before school starts.  It’s not like if you over order toner at the beginning of the year it’s going to sit around and go bad, or unused.  Aaarrrgghh!

We are used to copier crises this first week, it’s not unheard of.  Several of my 18 first weeks the machine has broken down.  Kinda sits all summer and then all of a sudden is expected to make a zillion copies in 3 days.  The poor thing just has a nervous breakdown. Or if the water had come through the ceiling and shorted it out.   But to run out of toner?  It’s kind of like the time I went to Arby’s and was told they had run out of roast beef.

3 comments:

A Paperback Writer said...

We ran out of paper half way through last year and had no funds to buy more. Several teachers donated their legislative funds to buy copy paper. Some bought boxes of paper out of their own pockets at Staples or such and used their own paper when needed. I dug into my reserve boxes of decades-old perforated paper for ancient dot-matrix machines, tore off the perforations and separated page after page to use that. This year, we're still required to buy our own paper for the small copy machines and for our printers, as the school cannot afford to buy it for us.
I got smart this year: all my disclosure statements, readinglists, etc. are posted on my website. I printed of 25 copies with 8 slips each page of directions on how to find my website for parents. The website also has a "print and sign" page for parent to sign that they've read the disclosure and have their kids hand in for extra credit. (Yeah, there's a way to do that with a survey, but I don't know how.) So, one class set of disclosures and 25 copies to cut up and hand out. That was it. HUGE reduction from the norm for me.

Still, I think the State Legislators should have to go 6 months without paper (or toner) for their copy machines and be forced to take their stuff to Kinkos (as we were also told to do) and pay for it themselves.

Max Sartin said...

I agree about making the Legislators pay for their own paper and toner too, I commend you on saving paper by putting the stuff on the web site, and I can even get my mind around running out of funds for paper half way through the year. That's just part of education in Utah. But to run out of toner, or even paper, at the beginning of the school year? That's a whole different can of a different color.

A Paperback Writer said...

If it's not because of money, then it's negligence on the part of the secretary.
In the meantime, it's either your website or Kinkos for you, I think.
Good luck.