A Hot Day

So, the other day, I was in the copy room--making copies nonetheless. I wanted to make some overhead transparencies for fluency. I had a stack of my master papers, and I put them in the copier. I opened the cupboard, looked at the box and read, "Plain Paper Copier Transparencies." I took a stack, put them in the copy machine. No sooner had I hit the "Copy" button then I reached down to take out my copies, when half of a transparency came out. Yeah, that's not supposed to happen. . . I quickly turned off the machine, opened it up, and there, wrapped around the heating element, was half of a melted transparency. Looking back through the box, I noticed that someone had put their "extras" into the box, mixing them in with the regular ones. I proceded to pull out little pieces with my fingers, burning the tips along the way. Finally, the machine cooled down enough to where it hardened, which might not have been a good thing. The remaining pieces hardened and got stuck. I had to call the office, tell them I broke the machine, and they called the repair person. Before he came, the lady from the office and I tried one more time, with her trusty tweezers, to free the pieces. No luck. Thankfully, he was just across the street and came right over and fixed it. Yes, he was upset. No, he didn't know my name. :) It was fixed so quick that nobody ever knew what happened, but I was sure worried! In fact, here it is a couple weeks later, and I still haven't attempted to make tranparencies. So, until enough time has passed and it's funny enough to talk about with the other teachers, we are just secretly referring to this as "a hot day in the copy room."