Printing

Tonight I went to the library to get my homework scanned in order to email it the TA for one of my courses. When I arrived at the printing room at 10:00pm, the doors were locked and the lights were out. In spite of the sign on the door that reads "We are here to help you. Hours: 7:00am - 5:45pm and 7:00pm - 5:45am," there was not a soul in sight. I banged on the doors. I tried to find a contact number. I looked in the bathrooms and the diner. I tried every nearby open door and solicited help from every campus employee I encountered. No one knew where the printing staff was and they were extremely pessimistic about the odds of finding them. They shrugged and advised me casually to come back in the morning to see if someone had shown up. Really? Really?!

Printing-related services have been a sore spot for students for a long time. It isn't feasible for most of us to bring printers to Kaust, so barring access to departmental resources, we have to rely on the library facilities. During the first two semesters there were printer/scanner machines distributed throughout public spaces in the library. These were serviceable, though far from good. The machines were constantly out of ink or out of order entirely. When I questioned library staff about the constant equipment issues they said that the primary problem was that much of this stuff (including spare ink) was on order and it took a really long time for anything to ship to Saudi Arabia. Again...really? Why are we just now ordering spare ink cartridges? No one foresaw that the most heavily used printers on campus for over 400 students might run out of ink?

Well this semester Kaust took steps to remedy these problems by establishing the printing center, collecting all of the previously available printing/scanning equipment into a single room and instituting a printing allowance. The printing allowance makes sense. Even a university as wealthy as Kaust shouldn't let users print with the careless abandon that ran rampant in the first year. Keeping all the printing resources in a centralized location also makes sense, but only if the people who need to use the resources have access to that location.

Understand that in my little episode from earlier, I was prevented from scanning my homework because one person was not there. The printing center was obviously supposed to be open, but the staff member was not there and there was literally no one else who could access that room and its resources to help me. In my inquiries for help I ran across the night manager of campus maintenance. He called the department supervisor in charge of the printing center. This supervisor had no idea that the guy didn't show up, or that the printing center was closed, and she said that there was nothing she could do until morning. How can a university's printing resources be held hostage by one person not coming in to work? There's no backup plan here? And how could no one be aware that the staff member was absent three hours into his shift? I mean, really?

Fortunately for me, the failure of my scanning attempt was not a serious threat to my grade. However, I feel bad for those students who have a more pressing need to scan and print. We are in the shadow of finals and many students have studying to do and projects to complete. Some of these students will be seriously inconvenienced by the inexcusably locked doors of the printing center. They will have no recourse, no one to call, not even an explanation to help them make sense of their defeat. The doors are locked and that's that. Really.