A memo to the copying machine: I don't dance

The BBQ Pit
1

Warning: lamest rant ever.

So I find myself in dire need of a paper in one of the big important journals in my field.

You’d think this would be no problem: just download the pdf, print it up, and voila!

You’d also be wrong, because the thrice-damned miserly goat-felching morons who run this sorry excuse for a center of higher education have only paid for an online subscription that stretches back to a year ago last Tuesday, and the paper I need isn’t that recent.

But I am resourceful. Ah, I think, I could just read the paper in the bound copy! After all, we have those back to the dawn of time! Yeah, bound versions are a pain in the ass to deal with, and yeah, the publishers deforest a small continent every decade or so in printing the damn things (25,000 pages per year for each subscription! Not even Robert fucking Jordan is that bad!), at least we have them.

Except, of course, that we’re not allowed on pain of dismemberment to remove the journals from the library, and more importantly, for some reason people get upset when you spend an hour in the library with a big expensive journal in one hand and a big orange highlighter in the other.

But I am resourceful. This, I tell myself, is what copying machines are for! I can just photocopy the article, and then I can mark it up to my little heart’s content!

Except, of course, for the Copying Machine From Hell.

What in the bloody blue fuck is the point of a copying machine that gives you little paper accordions? I don’t play the accordion. I don’t even like the accordion. In fact, I positively loathe the fucking accordion. (I also don’t know how to spell accordion, but that’s beside the point.)

But you know, even if I loved accordions, there are times for accordions and times for lack of accordions… and when I’m trying to copy the big important journal article, I want a copy of the big important journal article, not a fucking paper accordion!

If this were an isolated problem, it wouldn’t be too bad… I mean, everything breaks every now and then, so if the copying machine were having issues for the first time in months, I’d be indulgent and only kick it once. But Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, this happens all the goddamn time! Why is it that this piece of shit institution can afford several supercomputers but can’t get around to either (a) subscribing to the damn online journals or (b) buying a copying machine that makes copies instead of accordions? What, do all the professors around here polka in their free time or something? :confused: UGH!

Right then, carry on.

2

Roll out the barrell…we’ll have a barrell of fun…
Well, except when we have to deal with the demon spawn of copy machines, that is.

I like it. It’s not lame. :slight_smile:

3

Uh, what’s a paper accordion?

4

ROFL, this reminds of the copying machines at my Uni, that can copy piles of paper from a feeding tray. The only problem is, the damn thing gets stuck every three copies or so, and then you need to open five different hatches to dig for the stuck copy AND the original. We have sometimes even set up betting pools on how many papers a machine can copy the next time before something goes wrong. I’ve only won one of them. :wink:

5

How to make your very own paper accordion:
Take a piece of paper. At the long edge, fold up a strip maybe 1/4" wide (probably narrower, actually… maybe 5 mm). Now do it again, only fold down so that you get something that looks like a V when you look edge on at the paper from the narrow end. Repeat until you run out of paper and get something that looks like VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV when you look at it end on. (I think it’s about 20 V’s, anyway) Staple one of these things at one end, and you’d get a decent fan, actually.

Alternatively, use the photocopier at my office.

I was thinking of calling these things “crinkly paper strip thingies,” but it seemed less descriptive.

Oh, and scout, thanks! :slight_smile:

6

Careful that the puffy paper doesn’t make you look like a pirate.

7

You haven’t lived till you’ve heard Brave Combo’s polka version of Purple Haze, known as The Jimi Hendrix Polka.

8

I don’t suppose they have flatbed scanners or anything --?

9

Ah, but you see, your problem is that you’ve inadvertently set the machine to “thwip, crinkle, spoit”.

10

It’s the “Thwip Crinkle Spoit Polka!” Everybody! (1-2-3-and 1-2-3-and)

Esprix

11

Library copy machines must be fickle creatures, indeed. I worked in the periodicals department of the library when I was in college. (Hey, if it weren’t for those big, heavy journals, I wouldn’t have had a job!) Said department had many, many copy machines, and most of them were malfunctioning at any given time. The copy machine guys were there a lot, so I know the university was trying to keep them running, but it was almost a lost cause.

Does your library have a copy service? The friendly folks there will copy your article on machines that can’t be abused by the general public…unless, of course, they think that you are copying too much and running afoul of copyright laws. There’s always a hitch.

Pile all the accordions on top of the malfunctioning machine with a note that says “Free Fans” (or, alternately, “Polka Party”)

12

What i like about copy machine is that I often misalign the page and only get a half a copy to a page.

13

Heh, I’m a librarian and I just LOVE it when patrons complain about us not getting the electronic version of a journal. Believe me, if electronic journals weren’t so fucking expensive we’d probably get them all. Don’t blame your library, blame Elsevier (a huge multinational publishing company) for buying up almost every academic publishing company and then jacking the price through the roof. And I mean literally–some of the scientific journals have gone up in price an average of 50% every year for the past decade or so.

So here’s the situation academic libraries are in: you still have to pay for the print version of a lot of the core journals or people will bitch; you have to pay a boatload of money for as many e-journals as you can or people will bitch; the various interfaces these e-journals use suck to varying degrees so people bitch when they try to access them; you don’t have enough money to pay for equipment or staff to put up with the bitching so people bitch even more.

The only way out is to either a) firebomb Elsevier back into the Stone Age, b) jack the price of a college education up about 300% (which wouldn’t work because then those fat-fuck leeches at Elsevier would just jack the prices up even more) or c) convince all the colleges and universities on the planet to pool their resources (i.e. research papers, etc.) into a common database and provide it to the public for a nominal fee which would, incidentally, put those raping slugs at Elsevier out of business. C), incidentally, is where we’re sloooowly heading. Sorry for the pseudo-hijack, but I hate hate HATE Elsevier. And give your library some credit for not being staffed by a bunch of morons: chances are the reasons they don’t have electronic access to the particular journal you want is that the publisher either has an unusable interface or priced the damn thing so high that they’d have to cancel boatloads of other journals just to pay for it. And remember, always ask the reference librarian for help–we’re glad to assist you as long as you don’t whine and moan about not having e-access to every word written in the last 2000 years… :wink:

14

lieu: have read your post, and all I can say is “do what?” Am highly confused, and hate to say it, but have no clue what you’re talking about.

Rest of world: Eh, I suppose I should clarify. The big reference library on campus has a lot of copy machines and some of them might even work! :eek: Unfortunately, it’s also about a mile away and since it’s July here in Florida and I’m a lazy bastard who prefers not to stew in his own juices… I use the library that the little separate institute I work for maintains, mostly because it’s right down the hall but also because I don’t have to pay for copies. We don’t in fact have flatbed scanners… we spend all our money on big expensive computers and don’t worry about little details like that. The staff has been bitching about the fax machine for a year now, so what did we do? Went out and bought another 80 nodes for the SP. Helpful. And of course, we don’t have library staff, so I can’t look forlornly at them and convince them that they really want to copy things for me. We DO have a second copy machine, for staff use only. I tried to get the evil copy machine witch to let me use it, but she kind of looked down her nose at me as if I was a particularly fragrant heap of dung, and I slunk off to my office to write my rant instead.

Fortunately, I now know the answer to my problem! Just find the “thwip, crinkle, spoit” button and turn it off! Hah! Take THAT, demonspawn copier!

Oh, and Wabbit, I detest Elsevier myself. We actually have access to all two of the Elsevier journals I might need, and a whole heck of a lot more that I don’t. Of course, Elseiver, in addition to being expensive, publishes some of the most ungodly crap, so I couldn’t really care less if we didn’t get ANY of their journals online, but we do. What we don’t get are AIP journals (such as J Chem Phys, in this case) back much earlier than 1997 or so. I can understand the real library not paying for it (they can’t afford it, they say, and I believe 'em), but since probably 75% of the papers that we in my own little corner of the world cite are in JCP, I don’t know why the people who run our institute can’t bite the bullet and pay the requisite vast sum of money for it (and since we have the real library not THAT far away, we could even cancel our subscription to the various print journals to fund this!).

Maybe I’m just naive. Heck, I’m a physicist; of course I’m naive. But maybe, dear God, please, if they can’t afford the journal, they could at least fix the bloody copier!

And lastly, I’m pleased to report that by catching the copier off guard at 6:30 last night just when it was getting ready to go to sleep, I was able to copy all ten pages and get only one accordion/fan/crinkly paper strip thingy! Woohoo!

15

Well, I don’t know why y’all don’t have access to the AIP stuff as they’re fairly reasonable as far as science publishers go but I can tell you that Elsevier (and a lot of the other publishing scam artists) only allow subscriptions to blocks of journals–i.e. you’ve got to subscribe to a lot of crap in order to get the few journals people actually use/read. Garr, I hate those bastards…

16

Huh. I didn’t know that. Probably explains why we don’t have JCP… we’re too busy paying for Chem Phys Letters and the accompany things like the Journal of Applied Underwater Ceramics or something.

17

Heh heh–yep, yet another way they screw academic libraries! :wink: