Xerox machines can sort papers.

It was day 2 of my internship, so I got to do really cool things like make copies.

I spend all my time in school in rigorous classes learning how to be a good journalist, write in-depth research papers, memorize useless facts out of textbooks and do other pretty challenging things, so my skill set exceeds basic office skills. These skills include things like using the expresso machine (I thought it was as easy has pressing a button, but it's really not), answering/making phone calls (I can never figure it out unless it's my cell phone), and making copies.

The assignment was to make 10 copies of this Jubilee guide for the staff that's like 20 pages long. So that's about 200 copies. Kind of a big responsibility and this internship is kind of a big deal, so I don't really want to mess it up. Or sound stupid and ask someone how to make a copy.

I spent several minutes staring at the Xerox playing with all the settings. I finally get it right and start copying. After awhile I start realizing that this is a TON of paper. Some of the sheets are front and back, so I decide to figure out how to do double sided copies. That only took about four tries, but I did it!

Once all the copies are made, I have about 200 pieces of paper I need to sort into ten separate booklets. I head over to the table in the break room and I start laying them all out. I'm about half way through sorting them and some guy walks in, looks at me, registers what I'm doing and says, "I think the machine can do that for you."

I consider this for a moment. It is a pretty fancy machine. So I just shrug and say probably. It's too late now anyway.

Then the receptionist walks in. Her entire job is basic office skills 101, so she's all, "Oh no!! The machine can do that for you!! It can do everything! It can punch holes, staple, sort, blah, blah, blah, blah," Then she says next time I should ask her. Whoops!

But it's okay, because it wasn't really challenging and I would have had to double check all the pages anyway and the alternative was doing nothing.