Wanna get away?

[ding] I am still at work and not free to move about the country (yes, even in the backwaters of the Far East, I can still reference Southwest).

This afternoon, the entire school will be watching a troupe of actress/ors putting on a play. Since it is guaranteed to be educational and boring even if I understood the whole thing in Japanese, I thought I would print out a few pages of the e-book I'm currently reading, so I set the first 75 pages of the PDF to print before lunch.

When I came back from lunch, the printer wasn't humming, and my kocho-sensei was fingering through the still-warm stack. He was probably wondering why a stack of 53 sheets resembling pages from an English book (he was an English teacher afterall) came out of the printer instead of his document. Worse, his document wasn't coming out because my 54th page had caused a paperjam.

Oops.

(update: a few minutes later) I opened up the printer and pulled out the jammed paper. Printer still not working. To cover up my ass, I cued up a couple pages of a listening test and a lesson plan I had written last year. Now I can pretend that a fraction of the print job--2/77--was meant for work.

(update: a few minutes later) The secretary opened up the printer and pulled out another sheet of jammed paper. Printer still not working. She assured me: "ドンマイ (DON-MAI, which I suspect is Japanese for "Don't mind")."

(update: a few minutes later) The secretary announced to the entire staff room: "The printer is now off-limits. But don't worry: the technician from Epson customer support is coming."

(update: 2 hours later, after the play has finished) As expected, the play was boring: man catches bird, man frees bird, bird grateful to man, bird turns into woman to be with man, man and bird-woman marry, happiness, bird-woman makes silk from her feathers to support man, man not work, more happiness, man gets greedy and wants to sell more silk for more money, more silk = dead bird-woman, bird-woman leaves man, man sad, lesson learned. Clap clap. I went back to the staff room.

And found printer parts all over the floor. The technician was still working on the printer I wrecked.

(afterthoughts) 17:02, the technician just left and the printer is no longer in pieces, so I assumed that it is now fixed. I very briefly chatted with him about the printer. Apparently the jam was caused by the printer overheating on a super humid day, and the ink got sticky. So it's not entirely my fault! It's the weather's fault! It's Japan's fault!

(in case if you're wondering, the book is Freakonomics, which had an excellent first 5 pages)