The Printer Jammed, and So Did My Common Sense

The printer on the third floor is named Gerald, and he has never once been on my side. Gerald jams when the quarter closes. Gerald jams when someone important is watching. On a Wednesday at 6:40 p.m., with a forty-page board packet due in the morning and the floor emptied out like a theater after the last act, Gerald jammed on page twenty-six, and the red light blinked like a tiny, sarcastic heart.

I was elbow-deep in the paper tray, sleeves shoved up, hair coming loose from its clip, when a voice behind me said, 'You're doing it wrong.' It was Marcus from IT. I knew him by sight and by reputation, which is that he can fix anything and says so as little as possible. 'Rear door,' he said. 'Gerald likes to be approached from behind.' We both heard that sentence. We both let it sit there, unattended, in the fluorescent light.

He crouched beside me. The copier alcove is narrow, and the air was warm with toner and static. He showed me the green lever, the hidden roller, the trick of pulling the sheet slowly, in the direction of the grain. His hand covered mine to guide it. A very brief, very professional contact. I memorized the temperature of it. 'Gentle,' he said. 'He responds to patience.' I said I'd heard the same about project managers, and he laughed low, near my ear.

I was elbow-deep in the paper tray, sleeves shoved up, hair coming loose from its clip, when a voice behind me said, 'You're doing it wrong.

The page came free in one whole piece. We both looked at it like a small miracle. Then we looked at each other, which was the error. I would like it noted that I rarely assess eye color in a professional capacity, and that his was the shade of something you'd want to sip slowly. Somewhere behind us, Gerald resumed, whirring through pages twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, as if tactfully giving us privacy.

I should have thanked him and gone back to my desk. Instead I asked whether IT also offered after-hours support for other malfunctions. He considered this with enormous seriousness. 'Depends,' he said. 'Is the issue hardware or software?' I said it was mostly judgment. He leaned against the copier, arms folded, and said that was outside his scope but he was open to a ticket. Gerald finished all forty pages. I stood holding them, warm as fresh bread, unable to remember what they said.

He left a sticky note on top of the packet: 'Ticket #0001. Details to follow.' Underneath, a time and a place, nothing else. I put it in my planner like a pressed flower. An invite arrived at 9:02 that night, titled 'Gerald Follow-Up,' Friday, 6:30, location 'copier alcove.' If you want more of this kind of trouble, TheFriend has short romance dramas like 'One Look Started a Dangerous Secret!' that I have been calling research. I haven't accepted yet. The invite is blinking.