Printer-related knowledge is exciting

It may be Fall Study Break for you Michigan students, but for me it's The Extended Weekend With Less Paper Jams.

Sometimes when users are waiting for me to fill or unjam a printer, they get impatient and ask 'will the printer work if I print?' I want to explain and say, 'Yes, I'm loading tray 4,which is on the bottom, but the printer moves paper upward, so it'll just print from trays 2 and 3 while tray 4 is open.'

But I know they won't listen, just like you probably stopped reading as soon as I offered more than four words on whether or not the printer worked, none of them being 'yes' or 'no.'

I live an exciting life.

(work for another 4 hours, because the first 9 hours today weren't enough.)

When I'm at the doctor and something's wrong with me, the doctor always tries to explain what's happening, even if it's too complicated for my stupid non-doctor brain. When I'm fixing a printer and somebody's waiting for their lecture notes, I tell them what's happening and they look at me like I'm speaking Portuguese. Backwards. Out of my butt.

If your lecture notes matter that much to you, then do us both a favor and treat the printer like your kidneys are inside it and I'm the only person who can save your kidneys (or at least get them out of the printer).

I know what I'm doing here, much like a doctor, and while this may not affect you in the long term the way a doctor finding a tumor in your scrotum would, it's affecting the next five minutes of your life. Long story short: Please listen to me, because until you realize that most printer jams can be fixed without me, you need my help.

Tune in next post, when I go on a vicious rant about how it bugs me when people jam the stapler and then borrow pens and don't return them! Man, I hate that!

The infinite shame of the pink princess pen

Today, at a work picnic, someone had laid out trinkets and other chintzy crap on every table. I found a pink pen adorned with fuzz and a princess on top.

I thought, 'This belongs in the Fishbowl, because nobody would ever steal this clown garbage,' so I put it in my pocket for future delivery.

Tonight at a meeting everyone had to fill out raffle tickets, so I took out the princess pen and wrote my name as discreetly as possible.

The guy next to me asked if he could use my pen, so I handed it to him. He looked at me like I was fucking with him, but I explained it was for the computer lab. 'YOU BOUGHT THIS?!' No, dude, I got it for free. You know, I've got the hookup on homosexual writing utensils, man.

Oh, and the pen lights up, so when the guy wrote his name, the princess glowed red and the guy glared at me.

But on the upside, he didn't steal the pen.

(bed.)

I think the only writing utensil more embarrassing than that pink princess pen would have been a purple dildo dipped in paint. "Here, guy next to me. It writes really big, so be careful."

Pen theft prevention and the most hated smell

At work, I get asked for a pen daily. We should seriously sell pens, or we should offer pens that punish the user for being irresponsible.

If users are too lazy to buy a pen and "just need one for a second" we could ask them what their most hated smell is. Then we'd rummage through the pen drawer and give them the pen that corresponds to their most hated smell (MHS, as we'll call it). That way, up until they return the pen, they will be miserable.

'Can I borrow a pen?'
'Sure. What's your most hated smell?'
'What? I just want a pen.'
'This is important.'
"Fine. Burning tires.'
(The consultant finds the pen labeled 'burning tires' and hands it to the user.)
Simple as that!

I've also debated getting smell pens that only occasionally emit the MHS, so that we'd get to hear people yell things like, 'THIS PEN SMELLS LIKE A WHARF!' or 'AHHHHH FERRET CAGE!'

(dinner.)

My most hated smell is a toss-up between "festering bath mat", "hippie dreadlocks", and "homeless man subway urine." What's yours?

The printer is frisky, needs sex

Yesterday a printer in the dental school was acting up hardcore so I had to put a call in to get it fixed remotely. While I was waiting for things to get fixed, a service employee walked toward the printer, looked at it like it was a combination of calculus and magic, furrowed his brow, and walked back to his computer.

The guy was older and obviously didn't 'get' computers, so I tried to explain to him what was happening. When I talk to non-computer people, I end up saying stupid things. Case in point:
'We're having some problems. The printer's being frisky right now.'

Frisky was not the right word. That is not how the word 'frisky' is used. Frisky does not mean 'not working.'

I pretty much said, 'The printer is horny right now. It would print your documents, but it wants me to have sex with it. It'll be working soon. You know, after the sex.

(Angell for 16 hours. seriously.)

During my 16-hour workday, I:
Ruined a Facebook group so that it said "Happy Birthday" to a friend (I will post this later)
Helped a platonic lady friend pick out the right man on Craigslist
Lent out the dinosaur pen multiple times, even if it doesn't have a swastika on it
Forgot everything else I did during 16 hours of "work"

If your boss has the address to your blog, you probably shouldn't refer to what you do as "working." The quotation marks, though accurate sometimes, aren't helping.

Henry, Lord of the Thermostat

Whenever I consult, I'm going to keep a log of the types of questions I get. On Monday, almost half of them were office-supplies-related.

Another popular question was: 'Can you change the temperature in here? It's really cold!' And you know what I want to say to that?

'Yes, lady, I can change the temperature because I am HENRY, LORD OF THE THERMOSTAT, but I love it when it's so cold that my balls retreat to the middle of my abdomen, so it looks like you're just going to have to check Facebook while icicles form on your mustache.'

People also ask for pens a lot. That makes me wonder if they came to the computer lab completely unprepared. 'I need a pen because I have nothing. Will you wipe my ass?' Drawing a swastika on the plush dinosaur pen looks better and better every day.

(Roving, 8am to 6pm.)

Swastika dinosaur pen crime deterrent

Today in the computer lab I found a green pen with a plush dinosaur at the end of it.

This is great, I thought. When people ask for pens, they get the green dinosaur pen. They won't leave with it, because it's big and goofy. That way, we keep our pens and needy users will look like the assholes they are.

So when my coworker Jenny came in for her shift, I showed her the pen. 'Oh, cute!' she said.
'Yeah, who would want to leave with this? This could be our new loaner pen,' I said.
'I'd leave with it. I think it's great.'
Well, this presented a problem, so we thought of ways to prevent dinosaur pen theft. Then it came to me:
'Let's draw a swastika on it.'
'What?!'
'Yeah, if the dinosaur has a swastika on it, users won't steal it because people will think they're in the nazi party.'
Jenny didn't like the idea, but that's ok. I'm going to get rich selling Dino-swastika pens.
(Sangria, tacos, etc.)

I'm glad I found a way to turn swastikas into a good thing. Sure, there was the Holocaust, and dude, that totally sucked, but now when you see a swastika, you can think to yourself, "I better not steal!"

Also, if a card-carrying nazi borrows a dinosaur pen, we are fucked. The swastika dinosaur pen is just screaming, "If you hate minorities but LOVE dinosaurs, steal me!" I know for a fact that I'm going to have to buy a dinosaur pen and draw another swastika on it if we lend one to an anti-Semitic paleontologist .

I'll help you scan documents, fix your life, etc.

Last summer while working in the computer lab, a woman asked me if I could help her scan some documents. While we waited for the scanner to scan 30something pages of a pdf that was probably already online, this woman started asking me for advice.

For example, she told me she caught her man in bed with a bisexual woman, and she asked me if she should believe that he's not in love with her, and if love can overcome this.

I hope this summer that this lady has all sorts of oddball shit going on in her life. I hope her boyfriend has sex with a varsity girls softball team and she walks in on him and twenty high school seniors.

Then I hope her man convinces her that they're all just friends, and that she needs to get to the nearest computer lab to talk about her problems to a guy who just wanted to help her scan some fucking documents.

(Work, 7:30-11:30.)

I like how she referred to him as "her man." That type of lexicon is usually reserved for oppressed women dressed like beekeepers. Or women that hang out in da club. Ya know, the big booty bitches.

If you show a hobo porn...

The other day I was showing a homeless guy a sexy picture of the topless redhead on the motorcycle. He had asked me if I could get pictures of women 'on that thing' (referring either to my computer or the internet), so naturally I said, 'Of course you can get pictures of women here,' then I waved my arms all around me, because that's where the internet is.

I guess I thought that if I showed him enough sexy women he'd say, 'Thank you, good sir, I appreciate your assistance' and then he'd kindly leave the computer lab and take a bath. Instead, he just sat there even longer and waited for me to bring up more pictures.

I guess what I learned is this: You show a hobo porn, he can beat off for a day, but teach a hobo to find his own porn, he can beat off forever. In public.

(work party.)

Hobo in the fishbowl

This morning at work a homeless guy came into the computer site. The man smelled like he'd slept in his clothes, wet himself, then rubbed vomit in his hair so he looked hot enough to pick up ladiez. He asked me if I could get any pictures of ladies on the computer and told me he liked redheads, so I brought up this picture.

After a while I got sick of him being smelly, so I asked him to leave. Before he left, he asked me if that was my cup in the garbage can. I said, 'Yep, there it is. In the garbage.' Then he picked it up and I said, 'There it is. In your hand.' and my new magical friend left, never to be seen again.*

(nap.)

*he was later apprehended by campus police.

I'll admit it: I showed a homeless guy what is essentially pornography in a university computing site.