Photographs by Tess Gruenberg
While taking classes on the Block Plan can be difficult, when combined with the numerous technical issues that have plagued PaperCut since the semester began, many Colorado College students face increased stress as simple actions like printing an essay on time becomes a major challenge.
“It’s annoying,” said Kellen Dreyer, sophomore. “My computer won’t link to Papercut, so every time I’ve had to email [the document] to another computer to print.”
Due to the way they deal with printer servers, Macs have become a great source of frustration for the IT department.
When printing from PaperCut for the first time, a student has to use their CC Single Sign-In in order to print, and most save this login information to their computer key chains. The problem is that the CC Single Sign-In requires a change in password every six months for security reasons, invalidating the credentials entered initially.
“At that point you’d expect [the software] to say, ‘Hey this password isn’t right, enter your correct password,’” said Chad Schonewill, Help Desk Team Lead. “On Macs, it will just accept [the wrong password], fail, and then everyone blames PaperCut.”
This leads to frustration year-round, as people cycle through changing their individual passwords without changing their key chains.
“It’s by far the most common problem with PaperCut,” said Schonewill. “We fix that an average of 12-20 times a day.”
Another problem present across all computers, Mac or otherwise, is the time it takes to prep the printer for your document. When you press print on your screen, the file travels first to the servers, is processed, and then appears on the printer screen when you scan your gold card.
For small files like word documents, this is near instantaneous. But, for files like large PDFs, it may not show up for several minutes, at which point the user has probably already looking for a different printing method.
“I certainly understand most people aren’t thinking through the file size,” said Schonewill. “You print it, it should be there, and if it’s not immediately it’s never going to be.”
While frustrating, the root of the issue isn’t PaperCut. The software’s servers are doing their best to deal with the sheer volume of documents passing through daily, particularly in the beginning of the block.
This year during Block One, over 750,000 pages were printed through PaperCut. Of those 756,188 pages, 136,355 were printed the first week and 88,322 were printed in the first two days. This is a 37 percent increase from last year’s 552,619 pages printed.
“Students, faculty, IT, nobody, wants printing the first couple days of the block to be a nightmare, but it always is,” said Schonewill.
At its core, PaperCut is an effort to help reduce the rate of paper consumption on campus and make printing more accessible to students.
“We used to have more printers on campus than employees,” said Schonewill. “We’ve done a lot in the last few years to improve efficiency.”
There was roughly 585 printers on campus when IT began their renovation. They exchanged the 585 small printers for more efficient Xeroxes and worked on the scanning system within PaperCut.
By making it necessary to scan the card before a print job could go through, a great deal of the misprints and uncollected documents disappeared. It also made jammed printers a lot less inconvenient, as a student could just walk to a different printer nearby.
Those were the easy goals. All they required was some investment in efficient printers and some structure. Getting people to use less paper will be the bigger challenge.
“If you imagine what it must be like for those printers,” said Schonewill. “With hundreds off students printing all their stuff, [the printers] print nonstop for literally hours at a time.”
This is due in large part to the block system. Students often need their readings quickly, and leaving it in PDF form is typically just not an option.
“Ideally yeah, we’d limit the amount of printing we do, but it’s a lot easier to print a reading than read it off a device,” said Gabe Delarosa. “Especially when you’re in class.”
Necessity for printing aside, for a campus that puts such high value on sustainability, this level of paper consumption is alarming. Especially when the paper isn’t even being used.
On Sept. 21st at 9:30 a.m. a student sent a 340-page document to a copier in Tutt Library, to be printed 80 times. While this was almost certainly an error, the job was approved while no one was present and the job burned through the remainder of the copier’s 8,600-page capacity. “It just ate ream after ream after ream,” said Schonewill.
According to Conservatree, an organization dedicated to recycling paper, one ream of paper (500 pages) takes about 6% of an average tree to make. This means that this error printed almost an entire tree onto the floor of Tutt library.
“What we need is to find a way to print less as a campus community,” said Schonewill. “I don’t think it’s IT’s torch to carry, but we’d love to participate.”