Photocopies are the story of my life

So, over the past week or so, I have had to get photocopies in various places and every time its more fun that the last. This requires an explanation: students in Argentina don’t use books to study for their classes. Books are too expensive. As it is, they refuse to buy all of the photocopies because those are too expensive also. So, the photocopies… no one gives you a syllabus or any assignments. You have to go to the photocopier and buy these documents. There are two photocopiers in the Filosofía y Letras building (where I have anthro and Argentine literature). One is on the planta baja (entrance floor) and the other is on the first floor (American second floor). The planta baja copier has a larger counter and more people working. All of the documents are in big folders and you have to find them and ask for copies….I’ve only gotten syllabi there. The people are always smoking and being that we’re in Argentina they can’t make change….money is so screwed up here, but that’s a whole other story.

The past few days, I’ve been to the first floor copier every day. The way the system works is that you first have to get a number (deli-counter style). The first time I was there I pulled B65 and they were on A97. I amazingly didn’t have to wait that long (no one from 20-50 was actually there and I found B55 on the counter). There is no line. Everyone just grabs a number and crowds the counter, smoking and talking really loudly with friends. When your number gets called, you have to jump at the counter because if you don’t, they’ll pass you by (you get ½ a second to respond to your number). Then, you get to push through people until you get to the counter and talk to the copy lady. She has a computer and looks up the materials for which you are searching. She then sends the copies to one of four huge printers (which spit out pages with writing on both sides), you pay and get to push your way out of the crowd. Its chaotic, but you wind up making friends because you chat with people while waiting.

For my anthro homework, I had to read an article. The prof. only gave us the title of the article and the photocopy didn’t have any information about the author or anything like that. We haven’t seen that prof since last week (each class has 3 or 4 professors teaching it). This week’s prof gave us two authors’ names for suggestions of readings that might help us with the homework assignment. I went and found the photocopies, which involved the copy lady and I searching the readings from last year’s class. I paid AR$4.7 (US$1.5) for my copies, which is relatively a lot and brought them home. At home, I discovered that one of the copies was actually the reading we had to do for the assignment…so now I have two copies of it and I wasted time at the copier. Argentines don’t really understand the concept of wasting time…like making a bunch of the same copies at once and selling them later might make sense…Gnoman copy really has this down a lot better…they should come teach the Argentines.

Then, I went down to the student services desk to sign up for classes. COPA told us to bring a photocopy of our passport and go fill out the forms. So, being the good student that I am, I went a week ahead of the deadline to fill out the papers and stuff. However, they don’t just want a photocopy of the photo page of the passport (like most places), they want a photocopy of every page which has stamps, which for me is a lot (like more than half my passport). This really isn’t a problem, except for that the stamps are starting to come through the pages and you can see them on more then one page. The Chileans use so much damn ink and the passport has been damp recently, oops. So, I’ve got the rest of the those photocopies and I’ll go later today and see what they say…