Here I sit at my new job, trying desperately not to look at the clock, hoping time moves a little quicker. It never does. I don't have a whole lot to occupy my time, so in the process of trying to look busy, or at least not fall asleep, my mind starts to wander.

The thoughts that can enter an unoccupied mind can be pretty strange, such as this:

I was walking to the restroom, and in the hallway leading to it is a copier. It is quite the machine. It can copy, fax, scan and e-mail all by using the touch-screen monitor attached to the top. I started thinking about technology and how it is quite extraordinary and what it allows us to do.

I thought about being back in college and remembering how we had to use boot disks to start a computer. You wanted to type a paper, you had to go and check out the WordPerfect program disks, slide the 5 1/4-inch disk into the floppy drive, close the door and then turn on the computer. These days, all this software is preloaded onto every computer.

Who would have ever thought that the computer would one day be in as many homes as the television, or close to it anyway? Or that they would shrink to such a size that we can place them on our laps and take them with us on airplanes?

I remember my wife and I taking a trip to Seattle one summer and walking around Pike's Market. This must have been in 1991 or 1992, and here I caught my first glimpse of a cellular telephone. A couple of guys were leaning against a fence. It looked like one of those radio phones you see in war movies. It was a box about the size of toaster with a normal phone handset attached to it. I can't imagine it was easy to carry around, but apparently this guy was expecting a very important phone call that he just couldn't miss.

Now, our phones fit in purses and pockets, can play music and surf the Web. Heck, they can even wake you up in the morning. They have all but made the land-line telephone irrelevant.

This is all just a roundabout way for me to not only look busy —- because a person typing at his desk looks better than a person who has dozed off —- but also to make the point that everything in our world seems to get smaller with time. Everything except the aforementioned copier.

Has anyone ever seen one get smaller? Has your company ever bought a new copier that took up less room than the one before it? I can't figure out how these machines missed the technology boat. I understand paper has to be a certain size and will never change (unless maybe paper too becomes irrelevant), so copiers can never be the size of a laptop computer (or can they?), but what requires them to continually grow in size? Do they get bigger to meet the demand of the consumer who only wants to add paper once a year instead of once a month?

Our copier has more doors than a motel and more parts than a Boeing 757.

Isn't a copier essentially a giant camera? It takes the original and basically transfers an image onto another piece of paper. Isn't that what a Polaroid camera does, or used to do? If something that could fit into a large purse could make a copy and transfer the resultant image to a 3-by-5-inch piece of film, shouldn't a copier be able to do something similar?

I am convinced that the Xeroxes and IBMs of the world have created their own 21st-century version of a Rube Goldberg machine. Take a simple process and overengineer it and complicate it to the point that no one has a clue what is happening on the inside, thereby resulting in numerous service calls for which they charge their customers hundreds of dollars an hour.

And for all the advances in technology, copiers always break down. Our copier currently has a piece of paper taped to the screen informing the rest of the floor that a service call has been placed. You'd think for the bells and whistles this thing has, it should be able to tell everyone when it isn't working. Instead we have to resort back to pen, paper and a piece of tape.

By the time the service technician gets around to cleaning it out, removing the jammed paper, rotating the wheels and gears, closing all the doors and restarting the machine (an act that takes a good five minutes all by itself), it would have been quicker to send the original via carrier pigeon to Tibetan monks living in a mountaintop monastery to have them hand-scrawl 100 copies and send them back.

But we'll all just sit and wait for it to be fixed and hope it stays that way until we get a chance to run off our copies before the next breakdown.

They make the Rube Goldberg copier, and we get played as rubes.

> Jim Costelloe is a husband and father of two who lives in Suwanee and works in the commercial mortgage industry.