Copy-Cat

I love Xerox. No, I'm not talking about my black & white cat who was a "copy" of her father, but the actual copy machine company.

Do you remember the days before copy machines? I remember watching my mother, Dot, typing out her piano recital programs on her old Underwood typewriter (you know, the ones that weighed 6,000 pounds and you had to type slow so that the keys wouldn't get all tangled up in knots) and then walking down the street to the local print shop. There a man would set up a machine about the size of a VW Bug in order to print out those little programs. It was an all day affair.

Remember those old mimeographs from school? The purple ink, the paper was always slightly damp and the whole class would be getting high smelling the copies? Oh, those were the days.

Does anyone else remember making some type of jello compound and then somehow transferring ink to the surface and making copies from that? Or did I dream that?

Now we can just get on the computer or run down to the local Kinko's and do whatever our little heads can imagine. It's so easy, so quick, so inexpensive, so professional looking.

But then again, are we making too many copies? You go to a class or to a meeting and you're inundated with papers. You glance at them once and in the trash they go. We spend so much time making these cutesy little hand-outs and fliers and I don't know about you, but I just end up throwing them away as soon as I get home (I don't throw them away in front of whomever made them because I know they're expecting me to stick them in my "scrapbook" and keep them forever).

Oh, Xerox, maybe I do mean my cat and not the copy machine company.