The Copy Thief

So there's a comedian who does this bit about how protective we are over our shopping carts in the grocery store.  His point is, we're  kind of obsessed with someone stealing our pre-purchased groceries.  Visit any WinCo on a Sunday afternoon and I guarantee you will see hundreds of people cramming their over-packed carts through equally over-packed aisles, just so they can score the best deal on HyTop brand cereal without risking their cart being stolen (meanwhile, their children are wandering 3 aisles over, unattended...).

But how often do you really think someone walks into a grocery store, notices a full abandoned cart, and thinks, "Wow!  What fortune! What luck!  An entire cart filled with exactly every single thing I had on my list!  I've just saved myself a half hour of my life!"

Not likely, right?  (True story though; this exact thing happened to my roommate Schuyler.  Not that he stole someone else's groceries, but someone stole his when he left his cart in a vacant aisle in order to battle the more crowded aisle one over.  He walked to customer service to see if anyone happened to have turned his cart in, but no such luck.  He had to start his shopping all over again.)

My story is not about groceries, however, but print copies in the student computer lab of the MSW program.  You see, there are approximately 30 computers in that lounge, and just 2 printers.  Often our professors are far too lazy too busy to link articles/powerpoints/handouts up to the internet until just shortly before class, causing mayhem in the computer lab while everyone frantically tries to get their materials printed in time.  I used to click the print button on my computer and then walk back to the printer and wait patiently until my items came up, before returning to my computer to load up the next item and repeat the process over again. Thus printing each item individually.

Then it dawned on me that I was wasting time with all of this back-and-forth business.  "Social workers are honest people, right?  Who would steal my print?  No one!"  I said to myself.  So one day, I decided to test this theory during a break in class, when the lab significantly less populated than usual.  I loaded up my class materials one by one and clicked the print button as usual, but this time I waited until I had hit this button for the last time before merrily walking back to the printer to retrieve my fresh copies...

... only to discover they were missing!  That's right, folks. In the 10 minutes it took for me to print my first item until I hit that print button for the last time, someone stole my print copies from the printer.


I'm never making that mistake again.