So, if I need to make 42 two-sided stapled copies of a document, instead of printing, going to the printer to pick up the prints, going over to the copy machine and waiting in a ten minute line, then programming it to make my copies…I just do it all from my computer. No fuss, no muss.
This is a big deal. I mean, it’s no cure for cancer, but it’s a big deal!
Thank you, technology god! (AKA our “tech guy.”)
Now…if they could just invent some way to automatically chop off the right hand of anyone who leaves colored paper in the copy machine’s paper drawers, my life would be perfect.
The scanning feature is intriguing. I have to scan workbooks anyway…why not just scan them and have the machine email the project to me as a .pdf and never have to deal with the workbook again?
I haven’t figured out the faxing capabilities. I hate faxing…it’s dying a slow death, and I’d do anything to speed it along.
Let me tell you something amazing. We just got this new special paper. You put it between two other pieces of paper and then put all three in the typewriter and you type something and get two copies of it automatically!
Also, have I told you about my new sliderule? It made my work fly by so fast that Mr. Lawson gave me an extra nickel for the stereopticon.
It means somebody from the US sent you a soft-copy document with page settings for some ancient, outdated type of paper that only one country in the world uses, whereas every paper tray in the printer/copier is loaded with metric standard A4!
Through the magic of RDP, I rock that copier from home, Holmes.
It saves having to hear a lot of frustrated muttering if I send any 2,500pp jobs from home after hours and pick it up in the morning. (We have three high end copiers, but it seem everyone has a favourite and it’s a sacrifice to use one of the others.)
Actually thiis is one area where Canadians go along with Americans’ damn-foolishness. Well, that and ketchup on everything.
Years ago I (the tech) tried to integrate one of these into my 5 machine network and it was a nightmare. The factory reps spent a full six hours over the next 3 days before they (we) got it up and running. Once it was working though - it was awsome.
Oh, yeah, had that feature where I used to work - it was great until someone started sending 5,000 page (no, I do not exaggerate!) documents to it, usually at around 9 or 10 am on a day when everyone else had reports due. Dimwit just couldn’t grasp that maybe such jobs should be sent to the Production Center upstairs!
I wanted that when I was the Asst Controller of a hotel. It cost us about 2¢ to print a page, due to the toner costs. But by using the copier it went down to 1/36¢. But our controller nixed the idea, he said people would let lazy and not pick up the stuff and the accounting office had “classified documents”
I tried to explain we could fix it so even if you hit print nothing will print till you walk to the copier and enter a code. But he was agin it
We had one of these in the last place I worked - the driver was really smart and would handle the imposition of pages if you wanted to print a multi-page document as an A3-folded or A4-folded booklet - it would even let you print the cover on stock from a different tray, so you could have card or higher-opacity paper for the cover - and it would optionally insert blank pages so the inside faces of front and back covers were left empty.
The staples came in a nifty little cassette that just plugged into the machine. It would also punch holes in a variety of selectable patterns and placements.
One time, it ran out of staples and I told one of the girls in the office to order a spare cassette of holes too, just in case…
That’s what we do in the music department here; the grad students and faculty have access to a scanner that can e-mail us PDFs. It’s brilliant - I can’t imagine having to photocopy all the readings I have to do.
Generally, you can set these machines up so that there is a maximum acceptable page count for a print job. Anything larger gets either bounced elsewhere (like to your upstairs Production Center) or just rejected back to the originator.
You need to have smarter people setting this up in your office.
