Photocopy Blues

I swear there is a divine conspiracy against all my efforts to complete my Peace Corps paperwork, and the gods are in cahoots with the office equipment. It's bad enough that while xeroxing my medical records on the office copier a month ago, the machine jammed and I had to open up all the secret compartments to make sure my sensitive health information wasn't imprinted on some roller inside the copier, to be superimposed onto all future photocopies for eternity. Of course three days later I discovered that I managed to rescue every page - every single page - except for my HIV test results, which were sitting face up in the output tray for all to see.

"Don't feel bad," Jeff assured me with a big grin on his face. "Companies these days are very tolerant, even accepting, of HIV positive employees."

Then, not having learned my lesson, I was back in front of the wiley copier a few weeks later, xeroxing the final pages from my physical exam before I sealed them in a FedEx envelope and shipped everything off. It went off without a hitch, it seemed, and I even made the FedEx deadline with an hour to spare. An hour and 2 minutes later, Diana slid into my cube and handed me a page - one page - from my asthma test results. "I found this on the copier," she whispered, a little embarrassed. It was the original. Christ! I ran downstairs to the mailroom to see if I could catch the FedEx guy, but my envelope had already been whisked away.

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Accountants are like porn stars in their superhuman ability to endure workplace drudgery when most others would run out of patience (Here I think of Dave Chappelle's "Wrap It Up!").