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Confessions of a photocopier repair man
Backside-related breakages keep service crews on their toes at Christmas...

By Will Sturgeon

Published: Wednesday 23 November 2005

Photocopier supplier Canon is warning customers to take better care of their office equipment during the Christmas period, claiming that the festive season traditionally leads to a 25 per cent hike in service calls due to incidents such as the classic backside copying prank.

Such a stunt, a popular mainstay of the office party, often results in cracked glass on the copier, with 32 per cent of Canon technicians claiming to have been called out to fix glass plates during the Christmas period after attempts to copy body parts went wrong.

Tim Andrews, a Canon employee from London, said: "We always fit lots of new glass to copiers after New Year due to 'rear-end copying'."

In fact, Canon claims a shocking 46 per cent of service calls are in response to non-work-related breakages.

Geoff Bush from the north of England said one case he'd attended, where a young lady had cracked the glass mid-scan, also jammed the scanner so that it wasn't until the machine was fixed and her colleagues all sober that copies of her backside starting pouring from the machine.

Partly in response to this trend - or perhaps the 'supersizing' of the western physique - Canon has now increased the thickness of its glass by an extra millimetre.

However, potentially the most alarming tale comes from service engineer Steven Mannion from the north of England who said: "I had to repair a machine with a photocopy of a man's groin jammed in it."

We can only hope he meant it was the photocopy - not the groin - that was jammed in the machine.

Mannion added: "The manager suggested an office identity parade to see who Canon could charge for the call out charge."