To the Editors:

I am responding to CIT director John Bucher’s letter from last week in which he defends the print quota. I am an Environmental Studies major and I have to use the CIT labs, so naturally I don’t hold with paper waste and the people who print 1,500 pages of scarcely required reading, blocking all the printers for hours. But what I really don’t like is the print quota and the way it was instilled upon us.

First of all, John Bucher’s statistical figure of 1,047,000 sheets of waste paper is fabricated! It is fabricated because last semester there was no print quota whatsoever and promiscuous printing gained unprecedented notoriety, if only because students were lured to think they could get away with printing stuff and not paying. Well, we are paying for this now because CIT wanted us to print so much so they could justify their stingy new policy and cite the 1,047,000 figure in our faces. Mr. Bucher, did we waste 1,047,000 sheets of paper in the spring semester of 2003 when there was a regular print quota? Can you tell us with a straight face why exactly the CIT decided not to have any print quota over the fall semester and so much paper that wouldn’t have otherwise been wasted was? (Please, don’t give us hardware excuses, the card readers and the Pharos system could have been comfortably installed over Winter Term.)

Last semester I got tired of explaining to people that printing is not free and the CIT would hold it against us and even cite the dreaded million figure. It hurt me to see so much paper go to waste and I couldn’t print my homework because of Gutenberg enthusiasts spewing out hard copies of the ERes database. What’s making me angry now is that with the new print quota I still can’t print my stuff out when I need it! Yes, it has happened to me two times over the last five days hurrying for classes I find that the printer is out of toner but the thing charges me 30 cents anyway! I’ve already lost more than 75 cents to the blasted machine and I hear other people fare likewise. If CIT is so smart, why isn’t there a way to cancel your printer jobs when you see they are not coming out of the printer (and thus not create paper waste afterwards)?

Where are my 75 cents, Mr. Bucher?

–Apostol Dyankov
College sophomore