That's a lot of pages for a printer.
Well, we're not talking about the sort of printer that the average person would have in their home. The printers in the library are a bit bigger -- with lots of room to put paper in -- designed to basically constantly have students printing from them. :P
So, while the printer can definitely
hold 200 pages, having someone actually print 200 pages
as one document is like... a lot. o_o Like, there were quite a few other students who were waiting a lot longer than they anticipated for their documents to print because everyone had to wait for the 200-page document to come out first...
ALSO, it did not help that this particular printer jammed up at least a dozen times in the time it took for this one document to print. Firstly, it of course meant that it took longer to finish printing the whole thing. Secondly, this poor guy's novel was like...
a mess. Usually, when an entire document prints without interruption, all the pages come out in order, face-down, so that you can pick up the whole stack at the end and everything's still in the order it's supposed to be in.
But if the printer's jammed, then I have to move that stack of paper out of the way in order to open up the printer.
And, each sheet of paper that got jammed was, well... part of the document that was being printed, which meant that a good number of pages out of this guy's document got badly crumpled, covered in splotches of ink, or were just completely destroyed.
So, instead of his document coming out in one neat stack like it was supposed to -- it was instead a
pile, made out of partial-stacks that inevitably got shuffled out of order, plus a bunch of crumpled, messy-looking pages. And let's not forget that at least a couple pages were bound to be missing overall. Ordinarily, if the printer jams up in the middle of a document, I'll just tell the student to re-print. It's not a big deal if it's only a few pages. And, if it's a slightly larger document and a student complains about needing to re-do a large print job, then we can refund the pages for them. However, I have never seen anyone print a document as large as 200 pages. At least, not as a single document. I suppose I've seen some people get close to that when they printed out multiple copies of something smaller. And like, at least 95% of the pages turned out ok... albeit in the wrong order... so it would just feel wasteful to think that this poor kid would feel the need to re-print a whole 200 pages like that. @_@ And not only did I just generally feel bad for this person's misfortune, I was also worried that this would reflect poorly on
me, the labbie, so I left a post-it note at the top of the pile to explain the situation, apologize, and mention that we can refund the pages if need be...
Also, remember how I said this printer kept jamming? Yeah, there was definitely something wrong with some of the mechanical bits inside, because it was consistently jamming in the exact same way, as often as about every 1-in-10 pages, throughout my entire shift. I sent in a report to the higher-ups about it, but that didn't mean that anything was going to happen right away. I eventually considered shutting that printer down entirely, so that no one would have to deal with jams in the middle of their documents, but, by the time it occurred to me to do such a thing, the next Great American Novel was in the process of being printed, and I didn't want to cancel such a large print job halfway-through... and then, you know, once that finished, there was the massive backlog of print jobs from everyone who was waiting, so... yeah...
I long for the day somebody prints this out...
CHICKEN
:P I don't know why anyone would deliberately waste valuable pages like that. The school pays for all that paper and ink with the
students' money, you know. Printing ain't free. XD
Edit: Besides, do you know how much paper goes right into the recycling bin after being printed because no one ever picked it up? >.> There is zero comedic value to printing a joke document like that and leaving it there. All it will do is take up space on the table for a while, until I throw it away after it's gone an hour or so without being claimed. >.> And none of the other students will care, either, because everyone just wants to grab their own documents and leave. o_o
