A printer is a beautiful piece of engineering. The very clever people that design these machines design them so they fit 500 sheets of paper in the tray. It is the most perfect fit you can find in an office. And what a surprise. The paper people actually package their paper into lovely 500 sheet reams.
So then why, when the printer beeps loudly altering you to the fact that she is in desperate need of paper, do people rip open a new ream and only insert part of that magical 500? Someone who is eagerly waiting for the rest of their document has gone to the trouble to answer the beep, locate a ream of paper, and open it. But the effort stops there because their hands only pull out a small sample of paper. That person then opens the printer tray, dumps the paper in and aggressively shoves the tray back into the machine before pressing the button to resume printing.
I fail to see how putting all 500 sheets into the printer requires more effort than the effort already gone to. Or is it a question of time? How much more time will it take to insert 500 sheets of paper instead of say, 78? I'm not going to conduct an experiment but I would say less than 10 seconds. Actually less than 5 is probably more accurate. I'm not sure if it's one person in our office who does this or a few. Personally I strip the whole 500 out of the packet and carefully lay them in the tray, admiring the satisfaction of the perfect fit. Is there anyone who can explain the need to break a perfect engineering process?
