inconsequential

For about ten minutes today, I may have been doing the most inconsequential work a human has ever done on this planet. 

Allow me to set the stage. 

First of all, I consider photocopiers to be one of the most impressive achievements of mankind. I'm in awe every time I use one. You just put a stack of papers in it- double-sided, singled-sided, it doesn't matter- punch a couple of buttons, and out pop perfect replicas, stapled and everything.  Honest to God, I'm dumbfounded now just thinking about it.

Anyhow, I was photocopying a unit of a book to be passed out to students for use in our class next week. I scanned each page of the book I needed, punched it in for 10 copies, hit the big green button, and let the machine take over. Whilst I was sitting there, waiting for the machine to do what some brilliant mind had built it to do, I saw that it wasn't sorting the copies. Rather, it was printing ten straight of the first page, ten straight of the second page, and so on and so forth. This was my error, for as astounding as the photocopier is, like any machine it will only do something if I explicitly tell it to. The entire job was 90 pages, so I couldn't in good conscience throw them out, just to save myself from tedium. 

As a result, I had to sit there and manually sort the 10 sets of copies. This was when it dawned on me, that I might be performing the most futile action in the history of man. Its futility was in the fact that not only was it completely superfluous, meaning there was a machine right next to me that was built to do just this job, but also in the fact that I know at least a couple of my students are going to lose this packet of paper before our class next week. The work I was doing to sort out those copies that will ultimately be lost, was work being done for no one, for no reason. I couldn't help but chuckle.