TIFU by killing the school copier.

Saw another copy machine-related TIFU, so I thought I’d add mine.

In the late 90’s I did my student teaching at a small rural district. They had one copier and had someone to make the copies for anyone who needed them.

All you had to do was leave the papers you needed copies with a sticky note of instructions and the copies would be done within a period.

She was a sweet older lady, very nice, but very slow. She also took long coffee breaks so she wasn’t always in the room.

One day during my second week. I had some papers that I wanted her to copy onto transparency sheets. She wasn’t in the room so…

I found some transparency sheets in a cabinet, loaded them in one of the trays, inserted my papers and pressed start.

Apparently there are transparency sheets that can go through a copier and there are transparency sheets that can’t. It was only milliseconds after pressing start, the copier made some groaning noise and stopped.

Milliseconds after that the copy lady came in and caught me red handed, and for someone I thought was a sweet old lady, she said some not so sweet things.

The copier had melted plastic all through its innards and was down for a few days while they waited for a service call. I got a strong talking to by my cooperating teacher and the superintendent. Also every teacher in the building knew it was me, and managed to both avoid me like the plague and give me death stares in the hall. I couldn’t wait to finish my time there. Needless to say, I wasn’t offered a job there and didn’t even put them down as a reference.

TL;DR. attempted to use the wrong type of transparency sheets in the school copier as a student teacher, broke the copier and turned the whole school against me.