Story for today -

Last year, in about... I dunno, maybe March, our sick sick printer that used to jam 4 or 5 times a day (probably more, since surely I cannot be the only person who was unjamming it), suddenly was so broken that no one could fix it and disappeared. They told us in April we would get a new one, when there was money, then it was in May, then they told us a new one would be bought before the next school year, as there was not more money in the budget. At the beginning of this year, we heard that rather than buy a new printer for the 40+ teachers in the Elementary, a new one would only be bought for the administration office, and we got our old broken one back in the middle of August. It would print one document and quit, then it disappeared again for a week, then it was back. As of today it's still not spitting anything out, yet it remains there like a plastic tormentor every time I go to the bathroom or to check my mailbox.

I think I only managed to print 3 or 4 things on it so far this year, since it seems to receive a print command and then say it was printing, yet nothing would ever come out. Every time I need to print something, first I open the print jobs folder and see how many are in the line. More often than not, there are print jobs in que from at least 24 hours before, if not days. I finally quit relying on printing anything and tried to find time to either run over and ask the principal to print for me on his private printer, or go down to the high school and try to use the library printer when there was a computer free. When ever I sent an email to our tech guys, there was never a sign if the problem was dealt with, fixed, or even acknowledged.

Today was the last straw, as I often have sent "please go have a look at the printer because it's not working, again" messages, and yesterday I sent one saying "someone please go put the printer out of it's misery because it has been dieing for a long time" - I had to print a small note to send home with the kids tomorrow. The document was a whole 4 pages long. Wow, 4 pages, what a strain huh? I sent it to the computer lab, where I was promptly chewed out for printing there as it isn't for common use. The broken teacher's printer isn't the computer lab guy's problem and we teachers need to go to the source of the problem and get them to get us a new one. Yes, I have been CCing the emails I send to the tech guys to our director every time, what more can I do? Rather fed up with this whole conversation (been under so much stress the last two weeks, I actually was close to tears), I returned to my room and wrote a lengthy email to both the tech guys, our principal, and our director, saying in short that the whole situation with the printer was ridiculous and totally unacceptable that 40+ teachers have no where to print anything and that some kind of response would be nice so we know that actually someone out there cares and is doing something about it. The director actually did come in, told me he whole heartedly agreed with me, and that something was being done. But when?