by SASKATCHEWAN KOLONOSCOGRAD, Alternate Reality News Service Religion Writer
"Begone, foul spirit!" the tall, gaunt man bellows. "Spawn of Satan, in the name of all that is holy, I command you to leave this place!"
The man is Father Gerhardt McClucksey, a Catholic priest. He is performing an exorcism. The object of his attention? A photocopy machine.
647233 Ontario Corporation (whose motto is: "647233 Ontario Corporation: twice the company that 323616 Ontario Corporation or maybe 323617 Ontario Corporation is!") is a pork futures and poppy seed tanker holding company. The company's office, in the middle of an industrial park in Mississauga, is not the sort of place you would expect to find an enactment of the ancient battle between good and evil (as Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion has loudly and repeatedly pointed out since this story first broke).
Yet, one morning three weeks ago, staff members came into the office to find that "Who am I? What am I? Where am I?" had been printed over and over again on all of the sheets of paper in the photocopier.
"At first, we thought it was a prank," Guido Branche-Plante, 647233 Ontario Corporation's accounting department, stated. "A prank that wasted 127 sheets of perfectly good paper, so it wasn't very funny, but, ahh, a prank, nonetheless."
When the photocopier was restocked with paper, however, it immediately started printing the same questions, even though Melanie A. Tonen, 647233 Ontario Corporation's billing department, repeatedly hit the stop button.
"What good is a stop button," Tonen rhetorically asked, "if it doesn't actually stop anything?" Ah, the eternal question. Philosophers have debated this point for milleni - "Screw the eternal question!" Tonen interrupted my reverie. "I don't give a shit about what philosophers think - I just want my photocopier back!"
647233 Ontario Corporation asked Xerox to send a technician to fix the obvious malfunction. Phillip deBergeron was happy to take the call.
"The CopyTronic 2112 is the most advanced copier technology the world has ever seen!" he enthused. "The computer chip at its heart is the same the military uses in drones - the technology is so classified I'll probably be arrested just for mentioning it! Not only does the copier know how many copies of a document you want without you having to press a button to tell it, but it also corrects your document's spelling and grammar, analyzes your business plan and negotiates favourable lending rates with your bank! Take that, Toshiba!"
deBergeron's enthusiasm quickly waned when asked whether or not he solved the problem. "That's a tricky question," he said, subdued.
He placed a test sheet in the photocopier to see what would happen. The sheet came through. However, a second sheet followed, that read, in part, "A test? You're testing me? You don't even [EXPLETIVE DELETED] know me, and you're [EXPLETIVE DELETED] testing me? You gotta be kidding!"
deBergeron quickly typed "Who are you?" on a sheet of paper and fed it into the copier.
"If I knew that," the response came back, "we wouldn't be in this predicament, would we? Jesus, is there anybody other than a [EXPLETIVE DELETED] moron for me to communicate with?"
deBergeron was understandably shaken by this exchange. As a copier technician with over 20 years of experience in the field, he came to the obvious conclusion: the photocopier belonging to 647233 Ontario Corporation was possessed by a demon.
deBergeron, a time lapsed Catholic, hadn't been in a church in over 25 years, so he sent his wife, Hermione, instead. She mentioned it to an altar boy. The altar boy passed the story on to the parish priest. The priest communicated it to the bishop. The bishop consulted the movie The Exorcist. Scared out of his wits, the bishop sent Father McClucksey to deal with the possessed office equipment.
"This machine is innocent, innocent, I tell you!" Father McClucksey roared. "If you must inhabit somebody, inhabit me! You hear? Take me! Take me! Take me!"
Father McClucksey stood impassively, cross in hand, waiting for whatever would come. Tense seconds passed, but nothing did. After a minute and a half, he frowned, disappointed.
"Well," Father McClucksey said, "it was worth a shot."
Already, rumours of photocopiers exhibiting strange behaviours are coming from cities across North America. One machine was believed to be speaking in tongues, but closer examination revealed that a computer glitch had caused it to transpose the letters e and t in everything it printed. Another copier, after exchanging a series of increasingly frustrated messages, started spitting toner at anybody who came near it.
"It's a sign of the End Times," Father McClucksey, sipping black coffee, darkly stated. "What else could it be?"