Friday, June 03, 2005

Guilty as charged

Last week, my managing editor suggested that I move into a new cubicle. I think deep inside, he was freaking out about my Toxic Cubicle theory and wanted to change the feng shui of the place. It wasn't easy to get me to move ass from the cubicle I had occupied for two and a half years, but eventually I gave in and did.

As I was clearing stuff I had worked on over the past few years, I came across an old carton full of a stack of books. I took the books out. And made a discovery. There, lying at the bottom of the carton was a thick stack of papers. About 30 copies of the same document. I felt my heart skip a beat.

Flashback December 2002

It was my first week at work. I had to make a copy of a page from a book. Nothing confidential, just some reference information on bryophyllum. I wanted to scale it down to 85% of the original size. Instead of keying in the percentage on the touch pad, I realised to my horror that I had keyed in 85 on the main keypad.

As the machine started hurriedly churning out 85 copies, I panicked. It was my first time using that photocopier, and by the time I had figured out how to stop the violent paper-puking, the machine had made at least 30 copies.


The feeling of immense guilt I had, as I thought of the wasted paper (and then the trees) was absolutely crushing. As a scared fresh graduate on her first real job, I did not dare to tell anyone about it. And I decided to ged rid of the incriminating evidence. I could not throw the sheets away, of course. That would have made me feel more guilty about wasting the blank sides of the sheets!

So I hid them at the bottom of a carton, covered it with books and pushed it under my desk, hoping that either the sheets would miraculously disappear or that I would discover them only when I had forgotten the entire incident. Well, looks like I hadn't.


The skeletons under your desk will always come back to haunt you.



11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did you know that in today's offices a person prints or copies on an average 50 sheets per day. So much for talking about the arrival of paperless offices ha ha ha! (what better way to do a print preview than to print it out and preview it after each edit...eh!)

(Ok the statistics is valid for Europe and US, I dont know how it is in Asian context.)

Kaps said...

Why do you maintain incriminating evidence against you. You could hv shredded the same.

Sayesha said...

Pramod,
That is so sad. That is just so sad.

Kaps,
Girl hasn't even figured out the copier, and you expect her to know the location of, and operate the shredder??

Not to even mention how suspicious my employers would have got to see new girl already shredding stuff! Hahahahaha! :D

Anonymous said...

Wvwry new office, within a week figure out the location and use of the coffee machine, copier cum printer cum scanner and the shredder :) And not to forget the stationery cupboard ;)
Your effort to not throw the 30 sheets or tear them since they were blank on one side kind of got negated since you buried it anyways ;)

Anonymous said...

Wvwry = Every..Thats what an allergic cold does to you :)

Sayesha said...

Naari,
I buried them 'cos I couldn't take the guilt, now that I've dug them out, and am (almost) over the incident, I use the blank sides to do rough sketches for page layout and stuff! :)

Anonymous said...

u did say 30 and didn't mean 300 pages right?

I suppose you are an avid recycler, don't use aerosols, keep electricity consumption to a minimal, and will be the first to buy alternative power vehicles when they're commercially available. Haina?

hehe. girls.

although the environment is not something to be joked about. (I needed to protect myself from getting flamed! :P)

Sayesha said...

Sahil,
Well, I'm not an 'avid recycler' as such, but I try and play my part, whatever little bit that is. Whatever I can do, I will do.

Anonymous said...

Good to know that your guilt is alomst gone :) Happy sketching!

abstractman said...

Paper paper everywhere
and not a drp of ink.

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