Xerox

xerox
verb, transitive. To copy a document by the xerographic copying process. Also a proper noun.

"Have you xeroxed that report yet?" Gloria, Anne's boss, sounded annoyed even though Anne had not yet answered the question.

"No, ma'am." Anne hunched closer to the machine's keypad, hoping that Gloria would take the statement at face value and continue down the hall to her office. She should have known better than to indulge in such a hope. The days when Gloria wasn't a bitch numbered only about one or two per month.

"Why not?" The intonation of the question was so flat it didn't even sound like a question.

Anne took a deep breath. "Something's wrong."

Gloria stepped closer. "With the machine, or with you?"

Anne felt her temper stir. "Both, I guess. I must have pushed the wrong key. It seems to be stalled ... thinking ... I don't know what's wrong. If I did, maybe I could have fixed it by now."

Her boss was silent for so long that Anne risked looking at her. Gloria was frowning at the machine's keypad herself. "This happened to me on Monday morning. It may be time to call the repairman." She sighed, no doubt thinking of the expense. They had decided not to sign a service contract. "But first," she went on, the hectoring tone returning to her voice, "try turning it off, waiting twenty seconds, then turning it back on." She gave Anne one of her rare, thin-lipped smiles. "Sometimes, when you do that, it heals itself."

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.