Anyone who's ever had problems with the office copy machine and printer has probably thought once or twice about taking a sledge hammer to it or maybe dropping it off a cliff.
Crushing it with a backhoe was a good way to go for Bill Dougherty and his staff at Wholesale Resort Services.Dougherty, director of administration at Wholesale Resort, and 20 employees placed flowers on the copier and watched with pure enjoyment as the machine was destroyed in the parking lot.
It was replaced by a new Kyocera 5050 valued at $7,250, part of a contest sponsored by Advanced Imaging Solutions to find the worst copy machine in Nevada.
"It was very frustrating," Dougherty said of the old copier that came with some office furniture purchased from another business. "We had to have tape on there to keep the doors closed. When it jams, we have to untape the whole thing and then retape it back up. We had a repairman coming out every week or two."
The top feeder drawer wouldn't feed paper through, the bottom drawer would jam at least once a day, and exposure on faxes was so light they were barely legible.
When one of the internal components broke a couple of weeks ago, the repairman actually used a Band-Aid to fix the part and get the copier working again, Dougherty said. It was costing $400 to $500 a month in repairs, more than it would cost to lease a new one, he said.
"It's the most frustrating piece of equipment in an office," said Gary Harouff, president of Advanced Imaging Solutions. "You don't think about it until you need it, and then it seems like the whole job just stops. We've heard all sorts of stories, but this one was a classic and the machine deserved to be crushed."
AIS, a Las Vegas-based office technology company, is celebrating its 10-year anniversary and wanted to find a way to build brand awareness and give back to the community, Harouff said. The company received 98 entries for the contest from a lot of unhappy people, he said.
Copy machines are expensive to operate and people don't often realize the large undocumented costs for business, Harouff said. An ounce of toner costs about $50, compared with just $5 for an ounce of fine champagne, he said.
"People are printing less documents, but the number of documents created is exponentially more. We're nowhere closer to being a paperless society than before," Harouff said.
AIS recently moved into its new 24,000-square-foot facility at 3865 W. Cheyenne Ave. in North Las Vegas.
Contact reporter Hubble Smith at hsmith@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0491
