Beware these words when they come out of a professor’s mouth. They THINK they’re making things easier for you, but nine times out of ten, they’re making your life more difficult.
Case in point: My comm studies prof told us he wanted to “save us some money on coursepacks” and decided to not have a coursepack made this quarter, and to just put everything on Electronic reserve. He said this would be easier than having us all go stand in line at the copy shop (which, I’m sorry, is not that fucking hard).
What “electronic reserve” means, for those unfamiliar with the term, is that everything that would otherwise be photocopied and waiting in a nice little booklet at the copy shop is instead in PDF form online that each person has to print out. Another thing this means, incidentally, is that he doesn’t have to pay copyright fees for using other people’s material.
All this printing took me three hours, several hundred pieces of paper, and half a printer cartridge. If you say that my time is worth $8 an hour (more than Blockbuster thought I was worth and less than what I think I’m worth), and my printer cartridges are generally about $50 a pop, then i just wasted $40, for what in coursepacket form would have cost me $20 or less.
Thanks, Professor!