A Certain Age

Posted on August 13, 2007 by Gene

With my birthday looming less than 24 hours away, I didn’t need this today: I became an old man who is too doddering to use a photocopier.
I stood in front of the blasted newfangled machine, put the document on the glass and pressed start. It whirred, it scanned, and I heard what I assumed was paper being printed… but no paper emerged. I tried it twice, perused the copious menu structure (when did copiers get menus, and how did we live without them?) and stood, puzzled, in front of this piece of technology.
The copier in question:

To the left is a large output tray with collation capability (I think). Nothing appeared. After a long search, someone finally found my missing copies a while later. Guess where they came out?
No, not on the left, in the output tray. No, not on the top. Not on the other side.
The copies come out UNDER the scanner area, UNDER that large control panel, in a hidden output tray that the user can’t see because the big control panel and its screen hides it. In other words, the user must squat down and look under that control panel to find his copies.

This, my friends, is modern industrial design at its finest.