Peter Jackson column

Jan 13 2005 By Peter Jackson, The Journal

January - a time for surfing the internet for holiday ideas, eating salads and flicking idly through the pages of the new desk calendar somebody or other gave you.

While browsing through mine for the month of November I came across the following interesting fact.

"Did you know," it says, "that 23pc of all photocopier faults worldwide are caused by people sitting on them?"

No, I didn't know that.

And what's more, I don't believe a word of it.

Despite having been invented for nearly half a century, photocopiers break down with amazing regularity. If cars had advanced in reliability at the same rate as photocopiers, we would still be driving the equivalent of Model T Fords. Yet, despite all the many hundreds of photocopier breakdowns I've witnessed and been a victim of, I've never once seen anyone sitting on one.

OK, it's something people traditionally do at office parties, but that can hardly account for nearly a quarter of the daily malfunctions.

Anyway, how can the people who came up with this statistic possibly know? Can photocopier engineers reproduce the last copy before breakdown, triumphantly producing an image of the offending backside? If that's the case, surely there's some branch of biometrics allowing the guilty party to be identified?

No, photocopiers are rubbish and that's all there is to it.

Not that they are the only electronic machinery to cause regular grief. It was with some foreboding that I read that the number of gadgets in the shops is predicted to grow by 11pc in 2005. High-definition TVs, digital radio and digital cameras are all expected to remain strong over the year and there will be new format DVDs holding six times more data than those currently on offer.

It's not that I'm a technophobe, although I think a watershed was crossed this Christmas when I had to get my 13-year-old to set up my new radio alarm clock.

And I do wonder whether - when non-existent pensions and a collapsed birth-rate means the average worker is aged 76 - the economy will grind to a halt as the workforce can no longer understand how to operate the technology.

Not that it's only machinery that confounds. My New Year started with a technological hitch when the ribbon page marker came off the new desk diary - and I wasn't even sitting on it at the time.