Goat Laureate

Our printer here at work automatically prints a page identifying who sent the print job before the actual prints are generated. The person is identified by their user name, which is usually their first initial and their last name, up to six letters. When I pick up items I've printed, I am greeted with a company-branded sheet of paper with the letters "dhale" largely and boldly printed.

I can see why they do this. For one, it's actually quite easy to determine from the stack of papers in the print tray which ones are or aren't mine. Also, if you make a habit of printing pictures of offensive objects (Lederhosen) and people (Madame Ruth Dreifuss), you can easily be identified.   

Because so many prints go through our printer, everyone has made a habit of putting the printouts that aren't theirs on the table neighboring the printer. There is almost always something waiting on the table to be picked up, and today, as I passed the table, there were five. They were stagger-stacked on one another, with the "identifier sheet" on top for each of them. Together they provided a very witch-trial-esque message by saying "uwillo bburns harlot, uwillo bburns."  And yes, we have a man working here named "Henry Arlot." I think he's french or something. I'm not sure who "uwillo" is, but Brad Burns works in product management, I think. Regardless, I think the "message" may have been for someone else. (This means you, Tiffany in accounting! No more fishnets!)

Anyway, now I'm trying to concoct a way to get people to print in a certain order, creating "serendipitous" messages to frighten the paranoid. I'll be sending out a message later today to Bruce Ware, Udell Willoughby, Bob Eaton, Thomas Morrow, Bahati Uya (she's Nigerian, I believe), Andrew Wilde, Peter Ackoff, and Gordon Oates.  I'll attach a document titled something like "Layoff Prevention Contract" that they'll want to print out.

If I time it right, I might get this:

"bware. uwillo beaton tmorro buya awilde packof goates."

That ought to freak the goat-fearing hordes right out.

Comments

[Rob Drimmie]

Hello!

Sorry for posting this in an unrelated post, but I can't see of any other way to get a message to you.

Your RSS feed currently only contains excerpts of your posts, rather than the full length ones. You may not care, and if not that's cool, but it'd be nice if you would publish full posts if at all possible.

I tried coming up with a witty series of employee names to send print jobs out as, but I only got as far as "Yuri Ourrs, Sung Fe, Edward D" before giving up.

Cheers, and thanks for the funny.

[sxtxixtxcxh]

i'm with rob on the rss feed thing... :) also, while we're on the subject: how about categories now that you're running your own blog? it'd be nice to have all the microstory mondays in it's own section...

i do like the new site. i have no idea how i found your blog, but every new entry is highly anticipated.

back on topic: when we got one of those new giant multipurpose xerox copier/print machines, one of the first things we did was turn off the "identifier sheet"... a waste of paper, in an office where maybe 5 out of 100+ employees were sending directly to that machine.

[Arlene]

Brilliant....absolutely brilliant.