Nathaniel LeMaster

This is a story about a Xerox machine that lived on the tenth floor of the building that housed my government agency. Nothing fancy, mind you, but it got the job done. In the old days, I suppose, our copier was sometimes abused. It was said, for example, that some of the secretaries had used it to run off recipes. I confess myself to having used it to copy the canceled check I was submitting to some creditor as proof that I had really paid a long-since-forgotten bill.
When the new regime took over the office, they first busied themselves with requisitioning more office space and hiring hirsute deputies who were dedicated to making ours truly a “people’s agency.” With all the money they were spending on additional personnel and office equipment, I was surprised one Monday morning to find that special interest was being given to our humble Xerox bill. For the next several weeks, we had to fill out and sign a form whenever we used the machine: a nuisance, perhaps, but no one contested the fairness. If it didn’t altogether stop the reproduction of personal items, it certainly inhibited me, Not long after, I walked in one morning to find a new employee prettily perched atop a barstool next to our Xerox machine.
“If you want something copied, you’ll have to go to her,” my secretary harumphed reproachfully.
“Well, girls,” I thought, “looks like the end of an era.” I admit I was slightly amused. Since it was also the first sign of frugality on the part of our new masters, I also took it as a good omen.
A short while after that, they moved our copier down two flights of stairs so it could side by side with a more ancient, and probably more abused, model. The girl and her stool went down with it. They cleaned out an old storage room, and she set up shop running both machines. Now our secretaries rode elevators or tramped up and down stairs all day long, to their enormous disgruntlement. Yet one operator for two machines did make some economic sense, so I listened with only one sympathetic ear to the secretaries on our floor.
One day, however, I hurried down on a rush project and, to my surprise, was met by two girls who seemed to be operating a single, giant Star Wars copier.
“Are you her assistant?” I asked, amused that the technology of reproducing paper was now creating jobs where it had once eliminated them.
“No,” the assistant chirped, “I’m the record keeper.” She showed me a sheet that contained the tabulations of any possible number of things that might be fed into a copier.
“See,” she said, “you have two pages and you want eight copies each. Well, I fill in the description column for each page and I show 16 total pages. Then I put your name over here and the names of your section and supervisor over here. We put down that it’s a rush and then fill in the date and time, At the end of the day, all of these things must be tabulated—and our records are Xeroxed and sent to files, copies to Joe and Charley.”
“Are you new?” I inquired.
“Oh yes,” she said, “we’re both CETA.” That was the first time I heard that famous acronym,
A few weeks later, I passed Joe in the hallway. Joe was our ever- faithful one-man mail room.
“How are you, Joe?”
“I’m not doin’ too well.”
“How so?”
“They’ve got me in charge of the copier room. Believe me, it’s not worth the raise in pay.”
“You’re in charge of the two girls on eight?” I asked.
“Would you believe three? Two .operators and a statistician.”
“How come two operators, Joe?”
“Two machines, two operators. Hey, we’re busy, I’m tellin’ ya.”
And so they were. There must be
a Parkinsonian correlation between the number of copiers and the paper fed into them. My observation was that the three of them were always cranking out paper in the two converted offices that now served as the copier room. It wasn’t long after that that they hired Carl. Carl was a college graduate with a government background, and a positive genius when it came to discovering our “unmet needs”— and meeting them. Because of this talent, Carl soon found himself supervising Joe, the three girls, and the two machines. He was obviously the right man for the job, too. Carl quickly determined that the two operators could work a lot faster if someone could meet our secretaries at the copyroom door, enter the work on the form, take the work to the operators, and drop off the completed forms on the desk of the statistician, whom, by now, Carl had tabulating unbelievable quantities of miscellaneous data.
When later that year the assistant statistician arrived, I had a chance to ask her what was being done with all the numbers.
“We use them at budget time,” she said. “Absolutely blows away the politicians. What can they do but give us our money?”
And she was right. When they built our new Office Reproduction Center, who could deny that more space was needed to handle the incredible work load being handled by our spirited crew? Carl, Joe, Mary, Linda, Ceece, Wanda, and Francine were doing a marvelous job. Later, when the would-be budget hackers in Washington suggested cutting back CETA, the politicians were the first to scream that services would be reduced, people would suffer, and crime would go up.
Besides—in the old days, would you believe they were actually copying recipes on the agency’s Xerox machine? Would you want that again? Honestly, think of the
waste!

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By Greg O’Brien