#19 - run, damn you, run! (04-97) 



the worst part about a copy machine, other than all the other parts, is the automatic document handler. when it works, it is like magic. stick a hundred pages in it, and it will thunk!-thunk!-thunk! churn through those pages one after the other, lickety-split, and out the other end copies appear, perfect in every way. when it does not work, a page catches on another, and another on that, and soon, wonderful to behold, a pile of paper lobstertails and spills out onto the copier, the floor, and into a pool of the baby jesus' tears, and all bloody hell is loose. this usually happens when a document is not paginated, and particularly when the pages are obscure charts and random numbers, making it impossible to reorder. if you've turned your back--o, you are doomed. the devil-face is pretty apt. but i love the 5090/5690 series! i actually have a record, given me by a kind soul (thank you, jim,) of the sounds of a 5090 running. i think the machine is generally no longer in use. but they were great. except when they didn't work. at least they never actually physically shot out their fuser units, though i had one come apart in its bracket once.

the first page is ok, i guess, by the standards i held myself to at the time, with mostly coherent panels, but the second is simply bizarro. what's going on here? why? why did i choose to do this? what was i thinking? i don't know: it's illegible, impossible to follow, and really not very entertaining. the whole thing was meant to be contrasting what the animals were up to--nothing--with what christopher had to suffer through. in the very center: forboding signs of christopher's ultimate death and doom. but you could have assumed that without my wasting your time by drawing a shoddy minicomic of it.

it just sucked.

this is, by the by, a pretty good picture of what it's like to work in a copy shop. the phone never stops ringing, no one knows what they want, the turnaround times are irrational, and the machines break. by this time, we had left the location we had occupied several years, and moved to state line--hence christopher asking victor if victor ever had the 'feeling we didn't actually work there any more.' they did not. no one, however, ever participated in mortimer easter's urban development contest; the correct answer would have been blockbuster video. the correct answer now would indeed be empty ruin, because the blockbuster closed down a while back.

i don't live at that address anymore, nor do i have that phone number. i think i mentioned that before, but i don't want anyone to get any ideas.






 

Posted: Thu - April 15, 2004 at 06:58 AM             |

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