Making Copies

Are you old enough to remember back to when Saturday Night Live was young and fresh?  Featuring comedians like Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase and John Belusi?  I still chuckle when I think about skits like “Cheebooga, cheebooga” and “Land Shark”.  Today, I was giggling under my breath about the guy in the copy room skit.

Remember him?  “Making copies.  The copinator.  The copy meister.”  etc., etc., etc. I’ve been making copies all week.  And typing, which I do before I make the copies.  I used to find this very annoying.  I did not go to graduate school so I could spend days in a hot room, slaving over a keyboard or copy machine. For free.

Now I’m resigned.  While waiting for copies to print or while doing the manual collation of 86 copies of a fifteen page document (that was one job), I enjoy the view.  I turned on “The Lion King” so I’d have music to type to, as I typed the aforementioned 15 page document that I also helped author.  It is a trial test being used in preparation for the National Year 8 Exam which will be given in October.

I kibitzed with other teachers as they came through to interrupt me to make copies of their own.  I ate an orange and some kind of new snack my family is selling at their store.  It’s Chinese, involves corn and something sweet, and has a texture remarkably like Styrofoam.  But it’s kinda tasty and certainly cheap.  I’m positive it can’t be healthy.  I shared mine with a Year 3 student and the three year old daughter of another teacher.  I’m not sure why they were wandering around near the office, but assume they heard the faint sounds of Lion King.  Or were looking for me, which frequently happens.

Rather than stressing about the fact that I was neither teaching English to children nor teaching the teachers how to teach English, I just got into the Zen of the week.  “You’d like another few hundred pages collated?  No problem.”  And in my head I could hear it.  The voice from SNL…”Makin’ copies.”