Ed Harriger's Copier Laws
(With Apologies to Murphy's Laws)
If a copier can jam, it will, and at the worst possible time.
If the copier jams, the jam will be in the most difficult area to reach with your hand.
The number of staff hanging around the copier watching the work is proportional to the number of copies to be made.
If all that is needed is a single page copy, the copier will jam.
The number of jams is inversely propotional to the number of sorted copies needed.
When making two sided copies the copier will jam only when the second side is approximately 50% complete.
The copier toner light will come on when you least expect it.
The copier drum will only fail when a staff member requests a "camera ready" copy for a presentation.
The copier will time-out and reset just as you are getting the originals into the feed bin.
When you need service in an emergency the technician will be on vacation.
The copier will not repeat the problem for the technician.
Most jams can be prevented by having the technician live next to the copier.
A mysterious space warp causes paper clips and staples to find their way to the drum.
Copiers are a pure manifestation of entropy.
The more important a document is that needs to be copied, the more faded it will be.
The only time the boss ever comes to the copier is when someone is making copies of gag cartoons or things like this.
The paper supplier will blame all jams on the copy machine.
The copier technician will blame all jams on the paper used.
The person in the biggest hurry, needing the most complex copying done will know the least about how to work the copier.
The less a person knows about the copier, the more problems there will be with misfeeds and jams.
The sales person demonstrated how a flattened, but badly wrinkled page will go through the copier as an original or as a copy paper.
The machine will not, however process a piece of paper with a fold where a staple was removed.
Copiers with automatic document feeders do not like thermal fax paper.
The document that must not be damaged will be most destroyed by the automatic document feeder.
The copier and collater will work flawlessly for multiple two sided copies when the originals are inserted out of order.
The staple (if present on collater) will jam in the most inaccessible spot.
The smallest problem, with the simplest resolution, requires two minutes to fix, after the technician expends three hours dismantling the maching and components to reach the source of the problem.
No one can explain how strawberry jam got on the drum mechanism.
Copiers that have memory to track the last operation before a jam get amnesia.
If one wants a single color copy, they will only discover the color cartridge is the wrong color after all the copies have been made.
Single sided copies make good scratch paper; two sided copies don't.
The instruction manual never explains the thing one needs to know most to fix a problem.
One always forgets to press 'reset' to obtain a single sided copy after someone made 100, one-to-two-sided, collated, stapled, multiple sized copies on the special paper left in the machine.
The copier ALWAYS jams when the boss uses it.
The coper never jams for the office equipment geek.
Office equipment geeks have a special way of talking to and touching a copier so it performs flawlessly.
A copier doing a specially formatted copy job runs with the 'interrupt' button disabled.
The serious layout flaw is discovered at approximately the fifth of several hundred copies in a specially formatted copy job.
The most elemental typogarphic error which should be most obvious will be found by the lowest ranking clerk or janitor after several highly paid and educated managers have missed it.
When you have the jam problem corrected you will
- a) run out of paper;
- b) run out of toner;
- c) be called away long enough for someone to remove all your work from the copier;
- d) discover an incorrect setting;
- e) all of the above. Everyone thinks the other department's copier(s) work better than theirs does.
The office person responsible for copier repair liaison gets to learn neat words and phrases like: Clutch, Micro-Switch, Paper Sensor, Drum, Selenium coating, Feed roller, Extraction roller, and "sign here please..." If you can read this it means the copier worked . . . this time.
If you think these copier laws are cool, or suck - whatever, write me an email at harriger (at) mbay.net with @ in place of the (at) and no spaces. I'm trying to eliminate or reduce spam.
Updated 1/16/98