Your workplace - how difficult is it to get a copy made?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve recently started a new (part time) job teaching a course at a college. It’s within my expertise, I’m well qualified and the class itself is no problem. What I had forgotten, having been away from academia for many years, is how convoluted their internal systems can be. I’m nearly drowning in multiple login credentials for various systems, having to get keys and other equipment issued to me, and learning the online system for grading and attendance.

Interestingly, the very expensive equipment needed for my course is there and ready. But when I asked to photocopy a document? There’s a process. I need to fill out a form, which goes to a secretary, and so on and so on. When I asked if I could perhaps just go to the copy room and do it myself, they reacted as if I had proposed performing a rain dance or human sacrifice.

So the next time I’m on a job interview and they ask if I have any questions, here’s what I’m going to say: “What happens if I need to make a copy of a document?” I’m thinking the answer, if honest, may be illustrative and tell me what sort of workplace it is.

I’ve had jobs with lots of bureaucratic nonsense and others where it’s just “do what you need”.

What’s it like where you work? Can you make a copy without it turning into a scene from Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil?

2

Wow, bizarre. College professor here, and not only can I go make copies to my heart’s content on the department copier whenever I want (though I do have to “log in” with my institutional ID card, so the system does know which “account” the copies are for), but our lovely department administrator and her lovely work-study student assistants will make copies for me whenever I ask.

No form-filling or special permission required. (We all grumbled a bit when the institution switched to card-activated copiers a few years back, as opposed to just having a copy machine in an access-limited room that all faculty could use at will, but it’s not really that onerous a system.)

I have never heard of faculty having to submit a form to get copies made. Is the issue that you as part-time (adjunct?) faculty don’t have an institutional ID card so the copy machine won’t talk to you?

If regular faculty are having to fill out forms for photocopying as a standard protocol, I would think that a LOT of departments would be seeing a torches-and-pitchforks-type response.

3

One possibility is that they’ve had a history of people doing at that school that they do in mine - break the copier, walk away, don’t tell anyone.

4

Yes, I believe that’s the problem. Part of it is I was hired quickly to fill in for a departing faculty member, so there hasn’t been time to learn all the systems.

But I’m more interested in the metaphorical question. How easy or difficult is it to get things done where everyone works? Or get support when you need help?

5

Dunno what the average is, but our place is one of the good ones. You better believe I bring the dept. administrator flowers from my garden on the regular! I know a good thing when I’ve got it.

6

I’m adjunct at two universities and don’t have to fill anything out. At one I have to scan my card, at the other I just log in with a universal code.

7

(Sadly, I am now on a committee dealing with new policy proposals for faculty conduct and other disciplinary issues that is opening my eyes to some unwelcome realities about how some faculty members even at decent workplaces treat staff members (and sometimes fellow faculty and students) in completely unacceptable ways.

OMGGGGGG you idiots, how hard is it not to behave like an enraged chimpanzee every time you encounter a minor inconvenience??)

8

I walk to any one of many copiers around the office and I just use it.

9

When I worked as an actuary, i walked down the hall, tapped my ID card on the copier, and made as many copies as I wanted. If I wanted a LOT of copies, or something complex, like a bound copy with chapter separators, I asked my admin to send it to the copy department, and that did require a lot of forms and waiting. But if it was something I could just stand there and do, there was no fuss or bother.

In general, my workplace was fine for getting random stuff done, unless it was something HR was responsible for, in which case it was generally horrible. They took away all our wastebaskets and replaced them with a few centrally-located waste baskets so we would have more “unstructured interactions”. (Instead, we tended to have trash lying around on desks until it was convenient to try to get rid of it, and overflowing central wastebaskets that you couldn’t cram your waste into. It was awesome!) And if you wanted to work on an employee review, yours or one for the people your supervised, the software was horrible and complicated and unintuitive, and really slow to refresh. Also awesome.

10

I’m working from home so I don’t make copies but, at my last job, it was “Walk up and use photocopier, maybe make small talk with the receptionist, refill the paper if it’s running out”

11

Somewhat related, at my first job, I was an engineer at a huge GE plant. Sometimes we had to print multiple copies of large documents to bring to meetings. There was an office that took care of that, no problem. But to actually transport the documents to the meeting room, you had to get the transport dept. involved - anything that took both arms to carry HAD to be moved by them. They claimed it was a safety thing, but it was clearly union. And their procedure was ridiculous - you had to submit the request a week ahead of time, signed by a manager. All for a guy to show up with a pushable cart and move 10 binders about 200 yards to a meeting room. Usually late.
In general, we’d instead have people attending the meeting pick up the binders at the copy department, carefully only carrying 1 or 2 each under a single arm.

12

I have a nice multi-function laser printer at home that I use to make photocopies. I didn’t generally use it for work, but I certainly could have.

13

Makes sense. I never get any documents that aren’t already digital so, if I needed a physical copy (which is very rare), it’s just me printing it twice versus making a copy of an existing document.

14

Federal government employee here.

Copies? I walk across the hall and make a copy directly. No tracking or logging in required. I can also print documents without any hassle.

But if I need to buy something? Holy shit:

  • Before we can do business with a vendor, they have to fill out a “Section 889” document attesting that they do not use certain prohibited telecom equipment. This can add days to the purchase process. And yes, some businesses do use that stuff, or they just can’t be bothered to fill out the paperwork swearing that they don’t, in which case we have to find another vendor. We keep completed 889 forms on file, but they’re only valid for 6-12 months (can’t remember which).

  • We can’t be presented with any terms and conditions during the purchase process, because the people involved in “micropurchases” (anything under $10K, which can be purchased on a government credit card) don’t have the authority to commit the government to T&C like that. Some small businesses are good about waiving T&C, but some are stubborn, and big businesses like McMaster-Carr can’t be bothered for your piddly transaction.

So what sometimes happens is you’ll find a product you like, and then instead of buying from the cheapest and/or fastest source, you go to a known reseller who meets the 889 requirement and doesn’t present you with T&C. They order the item you need from the source you found, and sell it to the government at a generous markup for their trouble.

All of this assumes you’ve already searched the GSA’s shopping website (a required source), and verified that the item you need can’t be found there, or is cheaper from your preferred source. Their search engine is awful, and it’s very rare that I end up being able to order through them.

And then there’s the people who actually make the purchase, the holders of the government credit cards. They weren’t hired in to be a purchase agent, it’s an add-on on top of their other duties. Most of them find the bureaucratic nonsense distasteful (I don’t blame them), and some feel like purchasing work isn’t part of their “real” job and give it their lowest priority, so you have to badger them to get a purchase to happen. Projects move forward more slowly than they could because goods/parts/materials are delayed, and labor is spent following up on slow purchase processes.

There’s a chain of several people involved in the preapproval process for a micropurchase before a card holder can even place an order. When goods arrive or services are performed, a third party (another gov’t employee) needs to verify with a signature that the gov’t got what they paid for. A purchase with many items in it may show up in multiple shipments, each of which needs third-party verification, and there may be multiple credit card transactions associated with each shipment. The card holder keeps track of all of this paperwork (and all of their credit card transactions) for each purchase, and their records are reviewed once a month by someone else. Maybe once every few months a credit card holder gets one of their purchases audited by someone higher up the food chain, and if there’s any sort of problem with the records, the card might get frozen until it gets fixed.

I get that they’re trying to prevent waste/fraud/abuse (article here from ten years ago), but my gut feeling is that all of this oversight might be costing more than the waste/fraud/abuse that it’s trying to prevent.

On the plus side, we’ve got great IT support. We also have a general help hotline you can call or email for any sort of building problem. Empty soap dispenser in the bathroom? Office running cold? Put in a help ticket, and they get on it pretty damn quick.

15

The only “difficulty” I ever faced was that sometimes the copier was set up in an adjacent room so I’d have to get out of my chair and walk into the next room to pick up my copies. I never had to fill out any requisition forms or record how many copies I was making.

16

We have a pretty expensive copier at our office. All I have to do is hit “Print” on my computer. It’s as easy as a mouse click away.

17

I worked at a college. It was generally pretty simple: you added the copier to your printers and you print. Or you put the document on the feeder/glass and pressed print.

The only exception was for certain copiers that were in public areas. To keep students and others from using it, you had to punch in a code before copying. When printing, you had to set up your computer to send that code, but you only had to do this once.

18

At my office (part of an internation property management company), they brought in some system where you have to scan your access card on the photocopier (that sits six feet away from me) to scan, copy or print documents. Manageable, as you’re supposed to have your card at the office anyway. Though my boss would often emerge from her office, get to the machine, then realize she’d left the card back at her desk, and wear a trail in the linoleum going back and forth. I guess it made sense if they wanted to track waste, but it was still a pain in the ass. And it was one more thing to go wrong on the machine, and the number of glitches and temporary outages went up by a lot.

It turned out that of the hundreds and hundreds of HP copiers in the company, our office was one of two in which they’d installed this device. Virtually everyone else in the corporation was able to just causally saunter up to their machine and make copies without getting Papers Please’d. There’s a good feeling.

Then one day, there was a firmware update that was incompatible with the machine, and which turned our copier/scanner into a 400lb paperweight. IT finally came to fix it, and disconnected the card scanner as a stopgap measure. We told them, don’t bother reconnecting it. A while later one of the IT supervisors called to say he was going to come by and “fix” the machine so that our card scanner would work again, and we collectively told him, with many uses of the f-word, that it was unnecessary. And hence we’re back to normal.

19

Academic library: for employee, super easy. Go to copier, make copy.

For students, there are no copiers in the library so they have to scan and then print. Which printing is cheaper per page than copiers were, so it works out better for them.

20

I’m not suggesting this as a perfect solution, but there are apps you can get on your phone which do a pretty good job of making a copy. They don’t just take a photo of the page. It’s more like a scan that you would get from a copier. It’ll make a PDF. If you have unrestricted printer access, you could then print them. Using a scanner app and then printing may be an easier way to make a copy if your organization has a lot of red tape for copies.