The Idler

Photocopier

I had a job in the reprographics department of a secondary school. It was a disaster from the start. The work load was impossible to cope with and the copiers kept breaking down. I worked on my own. Queues of teachers psychotic with stress screamed for their copying to be done immediately. It was impossible to keep up with these “emergencies”, let alone the work they left in the tray for “when you get a moment”. I never got a moment. If I made a mistake I was sent to the office for a dressing down from the school manager, who was a teacher. During these moments I wore short pants and had a runny nose.

I came to see the cramped little room I worked in as one big amplifier, sensitive to my every move. If I hit a wrong button on the copier (forgot to select “enlarge A4-A3″ for instance) it wasn’t just one mistake, but 240 mistakes, or however many copies were run off. The book keeping was similarly frustrating, all done by hand, written in columns so that an incorrect number in the middle meant that all the figures which came after it were wrong and had to be laboriously erased with correction fluid and re-entered.

Thomas De Quincey had an epiphany in St. Paul�s Cathedral Whispering Gallery when he realised that the multitude of echoes emanating from a single point were like decisions taken in the present, which then grow and become the tangled, intractable situations of the future. His eureka moment became my hades. Those papers flying out of the copiers were the reverb echoes in some kind of nightmarish King Tubby or Keith Hudson track. A single pulse of information duplicated times X, which became a metaphor for determinism. Doing things right first time was the key, but as I was constantly under siege from all angles it was impossible not to make mistakes, molehill-sized mistakes which grew into Mount Everests of wrongness and had to be addressed. I asked the school manager to dismiss me after 3 months, at his suggestion. I can no longer listen to the dub records I once loved dearly.

Steve Hanson