The Form Was Also The Message

I've been sharing a printer with three others at work. One of them resigned recently, and when he left, he had to turn over all his equipment. As luck would have it, the printer, and his computer which was directly connected to it, were listed in his name. He had to surrender all of these before he could get his clearance to leave. I, and my other companion, were suddenly left without any means to make hard copies of any of our files. So I called the office administration rep and described our predicament.

Me: Can we get the printer back, have it reconnected to our computers?

Rep: Sure, no problem. All you need to do is give us a formal request.

Me: Is that all?

Rep: Yup. Sure.

Me: Okay, thanks!

I hung up the phone, happy that there was a simple solution to this. Or so I thought.

I'm sure you guys saw the problem before I did. It took me a good fifteen minutes after this conversation to realize: How the heck am I going to print out a formal request if I didn't have a printer?

I could've saved the file into a flash drive and borrowed another computer connected to a printer, but the thing was, all this happened on a Friday evening, and a lot of people were shutting down their computers, preparing to leave. What's more, my printer at home was on the blink.

What to do? What to do?

Of course, my good old typewriter came to the rescue again!

I typed out my request over the weekend, and gave it in first thing Monday morning. Let me tell you, everyone in Admin who saw the memo were laughing after reading it.

"Okay, I guess we have to get you a printer soon so you won't have to 'type' your files anymore," the Admin head said, smiling as she spoke. "When I saw your memo, I actually panicked, thinking that there was something I hadn't got to from twenty years ago!"

The ending is even better than I expected. Not only was the old printer reconnected, a new one will be procured and delivered soon. The form was also the message. :)