Young People – are you familar with the term "Photocopier".

I think I’m having my leg pulled.

We’ve got a young person working for us, he’s 18, he’s very bright, not terribly worldly, but more so than I was at his age.

I just walked into my office to find him swearing at our 3-in-1 printer combo thing – “I just **** want to scan to print grrrr” and he’s firing through the menus like the IT Support bod he is, “where is the bloody scan to print option”, “it’s got a scanner and a printer ffs”.

It took me a little while to work out he just wanted to photocopy something so I said “just press copy” it whirred away and he was happy – I mentioned there was a massive floor standing photocopier next door and he sort of looked blankly at me, to him it’s a big scanner / printer, which in fairness it correct, 99% of the time it scans and prints, no many people actually photocopy these days, but I was amazed the concept was so alien to him.

Am I out of touch, are photocopiers out with the arc? The office equivalent of the VHS?

Yes cool story I know.

How does he “scan and print” his arse at the Christmas Party???

Young people nowadays…….Pfffft!

How does he scan and print his arse at the Christmas Party???

SnapChat?

Explain to him the time honoured tradition of photocopying your (or if you are very lucky yours and somebody else’s) body parts and ask him how his la-de-dah printer scanner could cope with that. He’ll probably show you an Instagram of some homemade pron shoot, but there’s no skill, or heavy lifting, involved in that, unless it’s a bit “niche”.

You’ve probably not got a photocopier, just a printer and scanner that look about the right shape. With the slight risk that a hard drive inside keeps a copy of every single thing that goes through it – though that might be a myth; I got bored before googling gave me an answer.

It’s a “Multi-Function Device” or MFD these days, grandad.

Fields. All of it. Fields everywhere.

I showed my 13 year old one of these the other day;

“What?! It’s an actual *thing*?”

she’d only ever seen;

She laughed when I said it would hold about the same amount of data as one of the web pages she was looking at…

You want to try getting him to fax something, just for the look on his face.

You want to try getting him to fax something, just for the look on his face.

If his MFD / ScannerPrinter runs out of paper I could fax him over a few blank sheets if he needs it. 😳

“What?! It’s an actual *thing*?”

How cute, someone’s made a 3D print of the ‘Save’ icon.

Wasn’t the story that Sony made the disk size, was slightly too large for usual shirt pockets, so the marketing depot. made a shirt with a bigger pocket to give the illusion that 3.5″ discs would fit in shirt pockets?

[ mourns 5.25″ floppies. no, not really… although our company made a copy protection system that bizarrely made use of telling the FDC to step over the disc track boundaries.. ]

I find that difficult to believe, I still remember my first primary school had a spirit duplicator (or Ditto machine) that was jettisoned for a proper photocopier before I turned 6. Scanner copiers aren’t that established…

How cute, someone’s made a 3D print of the ‘Save’ icon.

Interesting point – how many youngsters understand what the icon is?!

Honestly, son, it means a phone.

No. I have no idea why either.

Some young Constables in our office did not know what Ceefax and Teletext were when we were making references to the Cornish Interent the other week.

perchypanther – Member

You want to try getting him to fax something, just for the look on his face.

If his MFD / ScannerPrinter runs out of paper I could fax him over a few blank sheets if he needs it.
Are you suggesting that a fax magics paper out of thin air? 🙂

I was rather surprised to come across this stuff washed up on the beach at Burnham-on-Sea several years ago…

I train quite a lot of graduates so am frequently having “Fax? What’s a fax?” Type conversations. I scare them by telling them that the next generation won’t have used phones with buttons on when they enter the workplace…

As a trainer I also store up a load of useless anecdotes to scare people – the one about copiers in the workplace was from FHM or something – Xmas party jape involving jumping on the copier to copy ‘bits’. Except the glass on them isn’t safety glass, so if you jump on a little too swiftly the glass may crack and split your ring… Apparently it bleeds quite a lot.

Honestly son, it’s meant to be a camera…

I find that difficult to believe, I still remember my first primary school had a spirit duplicator (or Ditto machine) that was jettisoned for a proper photocopier before I turned 6.

Youngsters. We had a mimeograph, it was an honour to be allowed to turn the handle. All those purple-coloured fuzzy reproductions.

I can talk with fax machines, still blows my mind. 😯

Banda machine. Oh the memories.
Made period 1 go much better than expected.

We used the Banda in the shool secretary’s office to produce the school magazine. Great smell (not the secretary).

As for fax machines, still used in banking for certain functions where hard copy is demanded.

Mmm, the smell of a Banda 😀

Sure I used to get high on that stuff as a kid.

Kids today don’t even have a clue about the relationship between a cassette and pencil (though likely have no idea what these items are anyway).

We had a graduate that had never seen a ps2 mouse port / plug, and couldn’t believe the pc needed rebooting for it to work.

We had a young office intern on a placement ‘doing IT’. But it was 1996 and IT didn’t really exist much. She was tasked with faxing out some information to various clients. After half a day of feeding in the document, typing a number and sending, then feeding it back in and typing a number.. repeat to fade.. someone helpfully pointed out that she could just que up the document once then type in all the numbers it was to go to and the fax machine would scan it once and transmit it to them all automatically.

“I’m still trying to send it to the first number on the list – I press send but the paper just comes back again” Elsewhere one of our clients was getting the same page again and again and again.

She laughed when I said it would hold about the same amount of data as one of the web pages she was looking at…

hey hey 16k

Indeed – who in Somerset brushes their teeth?

I found a price list for Weslake parts the other day, I must have got it around 1980, it stills smells!
I remember the teachers in school writing out the sheets you stick in the Roneo and getting a kid to turn the handle of the copier.

A mates wife worked for[name withheld] when they got a laser colour copier, she came home with a handful of pound notes she had printed, they looked nothing like a pound note, but I am told they worked fine
in a dark pub;-)

Ha! Someone asked me to send in a paper copy of my electricity bill to prove my address the other day. How I laughed. Until I realised they were serious!

Yes, I had that recently when renting a van. “Have you got a recent utility bill to prove your address?” “No, but here’s the delivery note that came with something I bought on eBay, will that do?”

Go and get the special pens

I sent a telex once.

Always hated walking into a lecture and seeing a projector. A few lecturers would use pens and write on acetate, but some lazy sods would have them preprepared. “This is the Lane-Emden equation for stellar structure, and this” fwip “is a complicated diagram of convection cells in the chromosphere, and this” fwip “is a graph of plasma density against depth”.

I sent a telex once.

we weren’t allowed to touch the telex, we had to write the note on a piece of paper and one of the typing pool would do it….

See also: ash trays on desks…I think in a office of 8 of us, 6 of them smoked…grim

Reading that back it sounds like something out of the Sweeney, it was the late 80’s!!

Wow, just had a trip down memory lane with the sweet smell of the Banda and acetate rattling as lifted from a projector.
I think I am officially old.

Firstborn is off to Uni next weekend. We considered the possibility that some hipster will take her back to their room to make beautiful music together. It was time for THE TALK.

You don’t touch the record at all where the grooves are! Hold it by the edges and the label. Yes the B-side really is on the other side! Use the arm lifter if there is one, and line it up carefully and gently guide it into the groove. Yes, the needle costs more than your phone so be gentle. I was pleasantly surprised when the deck worked first time after being in the cellar for fifteen years, just a couple of confused spiders emerging when the platter started to whirr.

A mates wife worked for[name withheld] when they got a laser colour copier, she came home with a handful of pound notes she had printed, they looked nothing like a pound note, but I am told they worked fine
in a dark pub;-)

Dunno if it’s always been the case, but you can’t do that any more. Banknotes are encoded with a pattern of dots which the copier will recognise and tell you you’re going to jail.

My first lesson in computer science at Uni involved producing cards with holes punched in them!!! I still have a complete copy of my PhD thesis text on a 3.5″ floppy. All 250 pages of it. A photo of my dinner on my mobile phone would not fit on e there these days!