B= Photocopying

"Photocopiers"

While aware of the advice of the agent who secured the deal for "A
Brief History of Time" that every equation would cut the sales in half,
I just have to do a quick bit of calculating.

I've worked in offices now for 12 years. As with most people who work
in offices, I started at the bottom, and since the late eighties, the
bottom has meant the photocopier.

So how many days of my life have I actually spent feeding paper in and
collecting it from the fan-blade collating guiders ? Say for the first
five years, I was doing five hours a week photocopying. Woeful
underestimate, and then it tails off to less than 2 hours a week.
Probably true now.

That still works out to 440 twenty-four hour days. More than a year -
or three whole years of my working life. I may as well have been
working for Prontaprint for three years.

Next question - is there beauty, is there poetry in a photocopier
?

I think maybe there is. Firstly there is the process in itself and if
you just wiggle your shoulders, shake off your modern-day cynicism, the
photocopier is a pretty marvellous thing. And secondly there is a sort
of freedom that this monotony brings - it is a small taste of what it
might be like to be someone different, to work in a factory, to live a
repetitive life - but because it is not an all-consuming, crushing
monotony - broken up as it is by ringing telephones, blurry faxes and
paper jams, there is a sense in which spending time photocopying gives
you perspective.

Okay not the sort of perspective that skydiving or near-death
experiences in hospital wards gives, but any tiny bit of perspective is
nice, isn't it ?

The physical photocopier - squat and rather charmless, it has to be
said. When I began they were uniformly orange, then a little black
crept in to blend with the orange, then computer-monitor beige and now
they tend to be that sort of still, soulless grey, the colour of
overwashed knickers. Initially, they sat and hummed and had basically
two different controls. There was something to tell the machine how
many copies you wanted and a button to tell the machine to get on with
it - start now, do it now.

I have fond memories of a machine with a "Turbo" button -
second-generation, the little stubby green Turbo button allegedly made
it go faster, so of course, everyone held it down all the time and
after a month it didn't seem fast at all. (What I will later describe
as "The Microwave Effect")

And the early photocopiers had no feeder, you lifted the plate, you put
the paper just so on the glass and you closed the lid. Unless, like
everyone, you were in a hurry, in which case you lowered the lid as
little as you could get away with and bathed your face in a
yellow-green light while the lens moved back and forth under the glass,
with a window-squeegee "Zzreep- Moooomp" noise. Feeders now practically
grab the paper from you - now we are too slow for the machine - it
takes it, counts it and spits out the copies in a way reminiscent of
the woodchipper from Fargo. Would a copier, if let off the leash, chew
up your wrist like I always imagine escalators are hungry for ankles?
Something I miss about having to lift the lid - you don't end up with
odd copies that have your wrist and watch at the corner, where you've
misaligned the page.

After a time, this telling the machine how many copies you wanted and
when you wanted it to start doing it wasn't enough. We wanted it to
sort the copies out for itself (in my view, a good thing, as I was the
mug who had to grab each sheet as it came out and put it into piles on
the carpet, making sure each pile was identical), and stapling (about
which I still have doubts, although the nail-gun noise is nice and
loading up the staples makes you feel quite space-age, they often fail
and just end up chewing toothlessly at the paper) and double-siding.
(Pay attention - there is no doubt that double-siding was a step too
far in the photocopying world, this has still not been mastered. It
will miss pages, it will spit pages far across the room, it will jumble
the order and above all else - it will jam, far, far, far more often
than it would have if you hadn't tried to copy it double-sided).

So now we have displays and enlarging facilities and there are always
twelve functions that you have absolutely no idea how to use or what
they would produce. We have ID numbers to key in, so that the machine
can count who has copied the most, or the least.

But the feature which makes photocopiers truly, truly poetic, arises
from the con-trick that is Service Contracts. These are the
arrangements whereby you pay someone to mend your copier when it is
broken, and just like Insurance cover, the people who run Service
Contracts want two things - your money and to deliver what you pay for
as little as they possibly can. They want the machine to break just
often enough that you think "God, I'm glad we pay so and so to fix
this" but not so often that they are out fixing it all the time.

So, in league with the photocopier designers, they came up with a work
of genius - the display that tells you where the paper has jammed, and
a front cover you can open.

Inside that front cover, which opens with a beautiful click that is
almost a sigh, almost a Fifties imagining of the future, you can see
the beast, unpeeled inside. And it is not circuit boards and wires - it
is lo-fi, it is levers, it is metal plates, it is rollers. And they put
switches and handles and little knobs to turn inside so that you can
play about and free the jammed paper that is causing all the
trouble.

To my mind, this coincided with two things - equality really hitting
men for the first time (in the Seventies, our fathers believed it was a
fad and were just playing along, but by the late Eighties, it was clear
that the male role had changed) and moulded engines in cars that there
was no prospect of tinkering with yourself. If your motor was playing
up, you took it into a garage, you didn't even think of attempting to
fix it.

So suddenly, here in the work-place is a machine, something that
everyone relies on and that inside is comforting, old-fashioned - like
the little hammers on an old typewriter with the rubber letter fixed to
each, nearly like a steam engine. Inside the guts of the copier, it is
hot and cramped and dark and there were things that nipped at your
wrist and got your fingers blackened. The Paper Jam bought men a little
dignity and breathing-space while they worked out what their plan for
the future ought to be. The Paper Jam created office heroes, people who
'knew what to do' - "Oh, it says E here. That's easy"

Subliminally, the copier-makers latched onto this - they made more and
more areas where the paper could get lost or stubbornly refuse to move.
More gadgets to free it up, more covers to open. "Open Cover B and
check for jammed paper". Photocopiers started becoming more and more
like intricate antique cabinets with secret little drawers and doors.
Sooner or later someone will beautify them, just like the I-Mac and
give them a walnut surround, with neat Edwardian knobs and
carving.

What thinking of photocopiers stirs most within me is a longing, a
regret that I was never there for the transition - the phase between
never even thinking about having a copy of something and "maybe I'll do
a copy for Jim, he might like to see it" - the middle-ground of one
huge duplicating machine which would be operated only by fully
Unioned-up professionals, the crisp and terrible blue of carbon paper,
with a smell that I simply can't recall, other than that it smelled
like nothing else and was deeply intense. What was it like ?

An odd thing - home photocopying never took off, never. At work, we
copy everything, just in case. Keep a copy of that, it might come in
handy. Maybe I'd better take a copy of this to the meeting, in case
someone hasn't seen it. At home, we can't throw away our paper quickly
enough - junk mail, bank statements, receipts, utility bills. Most of
us don't want to keep them, let alone take copies of them.