He's Dead, Jim

My printer died. And it did not go gentle into that good night, either. It made a churning, creaking sound, as if funneling a paper through its gears and depositing ink on to it was the most painful and impossible task imaginable. This is the sound I make when I'm asked to work 4 hours of overtime. Like, "whaaaaaaa.....unggggghhhh......grrrr............ppppfffffftttttt............."

The only difference was, the printer didn't ask if it gets time-and-a-half before refusing to continue working. It just died.

I have horrible, horrible, horrible, incredibly horrible luck with printers.

All machines, really. You should see me try to send a fax. Why do fax machines require that you feed in each individual page separately with precision timing?

Every time I've had to fax something in my life, I've had to do it at least 5 times to get it right. Either I wait too long, and the second page doesn't send, and so I have to redial and send the separate page as a different fax, or I don't wait long enough, and the two pages run together and the fax machine tries to print Page 1 and Page 2 on the same page.

True story:

When I was a UCLA undergrad, I tutored a high school student for the verbal section of the SAT. I don't remember her name, or anything about her, other than she was Indian and didn't know what a lot of simple words meant. Like "tact." It's hard to tutor people for the verbal section. You can teach them the basic tricks, how to best approach the questions, but you can't really TEACH someone vocabulary. They just have to, you know, read and stuff.

Anyway, as part of the program, I had to give this girl an official Kaplan Practice Test. Then I'd get her results, show them to Kaplan, proved she had learned SOMETHING from my time with her, and I get real paid.

So, of course, I forget the Practice Test at our last session. (She actually lasted an entire six month term with me as her tutor, if you can imagine...) So I told her I'd fax it to her the next day.

This was a ridiculous stupid lie, told to get away from her disagreeable, strict mother, who of course was very distressed that I had forgotten the Practice Test that she had paid for with her own money. I didn't have a fax machine. Or even access to a fax machine. Or, as you'll see in the following paragraph, the dexterity to operate a fax machine.

I eventually realized that somewhere, deep within the bowels of the Daily Bruin office, there was in fact a fax machine. It wasn't in my area of the office. It wasn't even in the editorial department of the Daily Bruin. It was all the way on the other side of our space, in the sales department (the people who sold advertising space in the paper).

I probably wasn't supposed to use it for personal business (or, let's be honest, know it was there). But, hey, I already spent enough time in that room - membership ought to at least have its privileges. So I go over there, brazenly using the sales guy's fax right in front of them, despite the fact that they didn't know who I was.

And, of course, I fuck it up. I first fail to turn it on properly, turning it to "copy" mode. So then when I push the phone buttons to dial, nothing happens. It's here that the sales guys have to actually come over and show me how to use their fax machine.

Then, when it's in fax mode, I totally have no idea you're supposed to feed in the pages one at a time, so I just sort of cram them all in there. The thing actually faxes to this girl, but it's just a garbled mess. I see a copy that comes out of the machine, reflecting the image I have to sent out, and it's impossible to read a single question. A full five-page practice test has copied on to a single page.

So I try again, feeding the pages in one at a time. But I'm doing it too fast, so the whole thing gets mixed up and illegable. It's here that the sales guys start to violently laugh at me, probably calling in friends from other departments to see how long it takes me to fax this thing. Naturally, they want to know what it is that I'm faxing, and for some reason I'm mortified to tell them that it's a practice SAT test for some high school girl.

Reflecting back, that's not very embarrassing. I could have been faxing in a prescription for gonorrhea medication, or booking a ticket for a gay cruise, or responding to a personal ad for Furries. SAT tutor is a fairly legit job.

Finally, after four tries...I gave up.

That's right, folks. I gave up. I believe my exact words were "fuck this horseshit." Although it may have been "fuck this stupid horseshit," or even quite possibly "fuck this stupid fucking horseshit." I can't be sure.

I then proceeded to quit Kaplan, never to be heard from again. Every few years, when I'm unemployed or underemployed for a decent amount of time, I consider going back to SAT tutoring for some extra scratch. But then I think, will they remember that many many years ago, I burned them and really pissed off some Indian lady? Were there long-term repercussions for the company for my behavior? Did that girl ever find out what "trepidation" means?

I don't know.

I also don't know how I managed to write so much about fax machines in a post that was supposed to be about my printer breaking down. This thing didn't go at all as planned. Fuck this stupid fucking horseshit.