Students are overheard in the hallways, asking passer-bys for help as they perambulate (with true purpose) back and forth. They’re wasting valuable class time looking for where exactly the “Mount Something” porch is, only to find they’ve forgotten which mountain they’re looking for. It’s a terrible conundrum to find oneself in, as it leaves one discouraged and slightly annoyed that they couldn’t manage to get a precious piece of inked paper. 

This discouragement may be a source of decreased confidence in schoolwork. The worry of not being able to locate a printer easily may be a reason why anxious students resort to using their phones. However, these are mere speculations drawn from observations; correlations cannot be concluded from observational studies.

The one exception to the terrible unidentifiable-printer phenomena which plagues our student and faculty body is, oddly, the printer which resides in the upper science cluster. It sits on a tidy little table outside upstairs physics and chemistry classrooms, which benefit from their great proximity to the famous UpperScience-HP. As always, science came to the rescue. The revered (yet very plain) name of the printer assists students in identifying it without wasting valuable thinking energy on it.

Sophomore Rubi Martin says, “The upper science is really the only one I know.” It’s the one thing she can rely on day after day to get printouts.

If you’re not printing to the UpperScience-HP, then you’re out of luck. “I think,” says senior Winston Tang, “nobody knows which printer is which.”

Junior Kate Kurata agrees, “I know nothing about the printers, nor their names.” She doesn’t use a school computer, and typically has “staff print stuff out” for her. Kate suggests that “labeling printers with their names on the top would be helpful.” A hurdle to labeling the printers may be to print out their labels in the first place.

But what should the labels be of? The mountain names? The average number of wanderers per hour that pass through that porch? The distance (in a sensible unit such as decameters) from the entrance of the building to the printer? The color of the carpet (or floor) of that region of the school?

Rubi suggests something much more ingenious than the previous ideas: that printers be named by what they’re close to. “For example, one could be named The Pointe Printer!” If there are no significant landmarks around, then printers can be associated with room numbers. “For example, printer 205 would be near that room and printer 112 would be near that room, etc.” 

Hopefully, students haven’t been discouraged in their multitude of quests to locate their treasured print-outs. One should have faith that students will figure out the perplexing printer predicament by the time it comes to leave Wilsonville High School. 

One thing everyone knows: That WVHS students will leave with the unexpected-yet-trendy skill of locating a printer in a sea of printers.