My Love/Hate Relationship With The New Copiers (mostly hate)

My school got new copier/printers this year. W00t! Machines that aren't older than the students! Hooray! Now if I could get some tables or chairs made in this century . . .

Since I started my teaching career with mimeograph machines and purple ink (yep, I'm *that* old), I've seen a few iterations of this technology. Mostly, it's gotten better: clearer, faster, more accessible. But every new thing comes with trade-offs.

We've got Ricoh machines. They mostly do all the expected things: printing, scanning, different sizes of paper, double sided, stapled (if the staples are stocked), etc.

The cool part is that I can send my print job out there and pick it up from any machine in the building.

Since 8/10 times the machine I walk up to is out of paper, out of toner, or otherwise broken, this is definitely a bonus--no time lost running back to resend my jobs to another machine. I just groan at the offending machine, then turn around and go find another one elsewhere in the building.

It's also nice that I can scan something and have it sent straight to my google drive (no thumb drives or other messy transport systems).

But there is so much annoying that came with these machines.

Efficiency is the single most important quality of any system for me. I'm always trying to do SO MUCH with SO LITTLE time and I've got no patience for technology that has to be babied or that slows me down in any way.

Last week, our internet went down (in the whole community because of tornado damage). So, I tried to un-tech my lesson plan by copying a play my students and I would read in Spanish.

But, without internet, the new machines won't even let you put in your code to use the non-digital aspects. So, I couldn't make paper copies from paper copies while standing in front of a copier because there was no internet access. There's no reason the machine needed internet access to do this. It's just short-sighted to fail to realize that we still need copies--no, we ESPECIALLY need copies--when we lack internet access.

Not cool.

Also not cool, the fact that I can't move smoothly from one job to another. I have to login to my account over and over again to move through a stack of jobs. Like most teachers, I gather secretarial tasks all day and then run to the workroom to do those jobs during my few non-supervisory minutes. These extra moments spent re-entering information I just entered? Super annoying.

It's also slower because I can't stack jobs. With my old machine, I could go ahead and scan job #2, #3, and #4 while the machine was processing job #1.

Not so this machine. It will release multiple print jobs and do them in succession, but it refuses to take another paper-on-glass job until it has finished the one it has, requiring me to hover like I'm making a tricky sauce instead of releasing jobs and using the wait time to do something useful like go to the bathroom.

So, yeah. One good thing and three bad. That's not a good trade.