Hell. That is where I am right now, and I think hell is an apropos description of day 3 at a University with no copiers. None. Nada. Not one copier on the whole of campus is in working order. In our building we had three, one by one they fell; not surprisingly because when one broke, everyone moved to one of other two, and when the second one broke, well you know the story. Now repeat that throughout campus and you will see the rippling effect this has had.

I shouldn’t say that no copiers work, I should say that no copiers available to faculty work. It seems that there are copiers available to administration that still work, but we can not use them. Although by now the restless mob is talking about sending all the copying to the presidents office and then see what happens.

You might be asking, as I myself was just a few days ago, why when the first of the copiers broke, did no one call a repairman to fix it? This would seem the next logical step, except as it turns out we have called and the people will not come. Why? It seems the University has an outstanding bill with Xerox and until we pay it we get no help. This seems reasonable and good business practice and it seems if we would just pay the bill then all would be well. But I guess that tug of war has been going on for the last couple of months. As it turns out no one has been here for routine maintenance in six months because we have not paid the bill.

Worse, of course is the awful rhetoric that administration is using to justify the problem. Are you ready for this? The highers ups say that the maintenance people are willing to come out here and fix the machines, it the accounting department at Xerox who will not let them. So it’s really the accounting departments fault and not ours. Yah, try to follow that logic. At a meeting someone asked why we just don’t pay the damn bill and get the copiers fixed so that we can, you know, teach class and go one with our jobs. “But you don’t understand,” was the reply, “it’s the accounting department who will not let the people come out here.”

Stunned Silence. I don’t even know where to start pointing out the fallacies here. My head hurts from the way in which they are trying to step around this. But they can’t side step too long because things are getting desperate. One faculty member already took it upon himself to head over to some copy place and then sent the receipt with a request for reimbursement to the administration. The people who are not as bloody brilliant as that guy are starting to panic. We have no access to put stuff on faculty pages, so we are very dependant on the copiers. I know that a lot of us can do a mambo for a few days, but eventually we will need copies! I don’t know how the hell faculty and staff are expected to do their jobs when we have no tools, and the students are starting to get cranky too, so there is no telling where this will go. I myself will be writing a letter to the union, lets see what happens then.