Old technology turned my school librarian into a monster

On my way to work, I walked past a relic of my childhood. A discarded ribbon printer, the kind that had paper with the tear off edges. You remember the ones that used to fill the air with the sound of robotic murderous rage.

It reminded me of my last year in highschool when the entire senior class was tasked with each producing a 3000 word essay on a scientific topic. Now, nobody in their sensible mind was going to work on it at home so we made the most of our spare block to do the research on our old box Macintosh's.

Now picture 30 seniors lining up to use 4 computers. To make matters the librarian was a time nazi and allotted us about 10 mins each on the computer. Frantically we scoured the, somewhat new, internet using Excite Search Engine desperately printing off anything related to our essay topic. From the librarian's office the printer jumped into life belting a horrid 'reeeeech...... reeeeech....' across the library. The printer average something like 1 page a minute and so we had to come back at the end of the day to collect our print-outs.

I never liked our librarian. I always thought she was a cranky and horrible person. But seeing the abandoned laser printer on the side of the road made me see her in a different light. She was once probably a nice caring woman enthusiastic about her career as an up and coming Librarian. She probably felt she had landed her dream job working in a school where she could help sculpt the young minds of future generations and teach them about books and the dewey decimal system. She probably couldn't wait to see kids reading books in a quiet room with the only disruption of silence being a low cough. Unfortunately, her dream job turned to s#!% the day that printer was installed. I no longer blame her for being a monster, she was made that way by years of ribbon printer screams...