So anyways, for those of you who don’t know how the printing here at the University of Iowa works, they installed this new system with a series of checks to make sure you really want to print whatever it is you want to print. The way it works is this:
Step #1: You click “print” like you normally would when printing a document.
Step #2: A little box pops up with the document information, such as number of pages and total cost. You click OK.
Step #3: You get up from your chair, go to a different computer called the “Print Release Station” (some of you may remember this from a previous post) and sign in with your HawkID. There you are presented with a screen that lists your print job(s) as well as number of pages and total cost.
So, before you can print ANY document, you have have to confirm printing THREE different times. At any time before you click OK the third time, you can choose not to print the job. First, you could choose not to click Print in the first place, but if you do, when the little box pops up on your computer, you can cancel. If you do click ok and decide that you don’t want the job printed, you can either a) just not log in to the Print Release Station, or b) if you do log in to the Print Release Station, you can STILL click Cancel.
Drew and I have had discussion about whether or not the system is excessive. I’m not exactly sure what the reasoning was for the University to install this system. I think I can guess a few of them. A lot of people used to print a job and not pick it up right away and forget and walk out and leave it. It’s wasn’t unheard of for a person to print a job and not pick it up right away and somebody else swiping a job that wasn’t theirs. It wasn’t exactly an infrequent occurrence for somebody to print a job that they didn’t need, or sometimes print a whole document when you needed just one page.
Which leads us to today’s story. Some girl had a big document, something like 100 pages or so. She needed just 2 copies of 1 page of the document. Well, as it turns out, she ended up printing the entire document twice. So instead of paying a dime for 2 pages, she ended up getting charged 10 bucks for 200 pages. Those of you who have been paying even not so close attention could probably figure out from what I have written here that there were numerous opportunities for this girl to bail on the job and reprint it the way she wanted.
So, he job starts coming out, and I hear her mutter “Oh crap” or something like that. She started grabbing all the pages she didn’t need and started gently placing them in the recycle bin. A few seconds later she asked me if there was any way I could cancel her job. I told her that I couldn’t and asked her if there was a problem. She told me what happened, and seriously, as politely as I could, I mentioned that she had several opportunities to cancel the job herself before it came out. Then she muttered something to the guy standing next to her something like “If he just get off his lazy fat ass maybe he could do something about this” and I replied that really, there wasn’t anything I could do. So then she just starts grabbing her extra pages and starts THROWING them violently into the recycle bin and swearing and stuff about how stupid this whole thing was and how she wishes I would just do something to fix it.
By that point, if I could have fixed it, I probably wouldn’t have. But anyways, I couldn’t. Duh.
