The Photocopier Made a Copy of Tomorrow

Our office copier is a temperamental beast that jams if you look at it wrong, and on the afternoon this happened I was already at war with it over a paper misfeed. I cleared the jam, closed the tray, and it whirred and, unprompted, produced one extra sheet I had not asked it to make — a copy of a page from a meeting, handwritten, in blue biro.

In my handwriting. Notes from a project meeting: action points, three names, a total in the margin, a doodle of a boat I draw when bored. Except I had not been to this meeting. The date at the top, which I write out of habit, was the next day. Friday. It was Thursday afternoon and I was holding my own notes from a meeting that had not happened yet.

I told myself it was an old page cached in the machine's memory, some scan from months ago I'd forgotten. But the notes referenced a client decision we were all still waiting on — a decision that, per these notes, went a specific way. And the boat doodle was on the wrong side of the page from how I usually draw it, as if drawn by a me who was tired, or in a hurry, or sitting somewhere unfamiliar.

I kept the page. I showed no one, because what would I say. And on Friday we had the meeting, unscheduled that morning, called when the client's decision finally landed — the way the notes said it would. I took notes, in blue biro, and halfway through I felt the floor tilt, because I was writing the same action points, the same three names, the same total in the margin. And when I got bored, near the end, my pen drifted to the corner of the page, and I drew a boat, on the wrong side, tired, in a hurry, sitting — as it happened — in a different chair than usual because the room was full.

I now had two copies. The one I'd written and the one the copier made a day early. I laid them side by side that evening. Identical, down to the fatigue in the letters. One of them I made with my hand. The other, the machine made from nothing, from tomorrow, and handed to me while I swore at it over a paper jam.

I don't fight the copier anymore. I clear its jams gently and thank it, and I have never again looked too closely at an extra page. Some machines, it turns out, run a little ahead of the rest of us, and I would rather not know how far.