Stapling

Sadly enough, most students' (and some instructors') presentations are accompanied by loose collections of handout pages (OK, maybe not most, maybe that's just my distorted perception, but certainly a lot). Sometimes these are collated ("Take n pages from the top of the pile and hand it to the next person"), sometimes they're not ("There are n piles of pages. Make sure you get one page from each pile") — mostly depending on how the pages happen to come out of the photocopier.

The result, however, is always the same: The supposed listeners spend half of the presentation, or at least the introduction, trading, comparing and sorting handout pages, so by the time they're done, most of them have no idea what the presenters are talking about; and at this point, it doesn't really matter how well the presentation was prepared. So, people, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE staple your handouts as soon as they comprise more than one sheet!

One could, of course, suspect that people deliberately don't staple their handouts to distract the audience from the presentation's poor quality, but I rather suspect that it is just a problem of poor planning: The handouts are photocopied last minute, which leaves no time to staple them; and who thinks of bringing a stapler, anyway!

To be honest, most of the time I myself photocopy my handouts only shortly before my presentations. I only have one decisive advantage: I know about the photocopiers' stapling function.

This function, which most modern photocopiers have, should be easy to locate and operate:

• On all photocopiers I know it's either on the main display or in a menu called Finishing. The section is titled Staple and consists of icons showing pages — often with an R on them — with tiny lines showing where the sheets will be stapled, looking something like this:
   
• Choose your preferred option.
• Put your original in the feeder.
• Type in the desired number of copies
• Press the Start Key.
• If, for some reason, you cannot use the feeder, place your originals on the exposure glass one after another, pressing the Start key each time; the copier will scan these pages to its memory, and it should say on its display which key to press after all pages are scanned (in my experience, this is always the # key).