The Kodak machine was kept in a dank, windowless closet in a corner of the basement, and whoever was on printing duty (Janice, God bless her feeble soul) had to sit in a tiny chair in front of the film machine and individually turn through and print thousands of checks, one at a time, hour by hour, for days on end. In retrospect, I’m convinced that the film machine was not actually designed by Kodak for printing images, but created as some type of governmental experiment on mind control and torture, devised to reduce its users to their basest forms. By intention, I think, they designed the machine to run out of toner after every twenty-five pages, and you’d have to turn the whole damn thing around, take out its toner feed bag, shake it like you were seasoning a chicken breast, and put it back in the machine in the hopes that your shakes had reinvigorated its will to cooperate. But of course, each time you retrieved the toner bag, the machine would cough out a plume of thick black smoke that would settle on your hands and face and pants and lungs, because the room was the size of a closed oven and there was nowhere you could move to escape the inky cloud. You would emerge from printing duty like a coal miner returning from the shaft. It was the office equivalent of solitary confinement.

It took approximately three days for Janice to break entirely. Before noon on the third day, the machine had already jammed ten times, she’d shaken the toner bag a dozen times more, and smashed the machine to within an inch of its life, and finally, she came stumbling from the room wailing in distress, absolutely covered in charcoal toner dust, her sobs creating clear streaks of tears through the black soot on her cheeks, her hair a nest of ink and blood and tears, her body a shriveled shell of its already shriveled former self, stained, soiled, and defeated.

We all surrounded her like a dog that had just been rescued from a well, patting her on the back and offering her water and food from our hands. Of course, there was nothing else I could do. I volunteered to take Janice’s place, but Shirley was sending her home to recuperate, and the regular work needed to be done.

The next day, Janice returned and Shirley relegated her to some other menial task in a different closet with a different machine folding papers that needed to be stuffed into envelopes, and it took an hour before Janice came sobbing around the corner yet again, and Shirley had to be like, “Goddammit, Janice, get your shit together,” and she got sent home another time and we all kind of silently bowed our heads.