Students Print Blank Paper As A Workaround For A Ridiculous Uni Policy, The Internet Begins Sharing Their Own Workarounds
The US may be notorious for its student tuition fees, but the fate of the average student is more or less the same around the world. After all, nothing is ever free (or cheap) and a job is usually the solution to making ends meet. Students often find themselves sandwiched between their studies and their jobs, with loads of other responsibilities and expenses in between. It is this specific socioeconomic context that has lead many students to learn to think outside the box.
So, it should come as no surprise that whenever a university comes out with a policy for free printing, some ingenious student is bound to find a loophole.
2 students wanted to use up their 500 pages of free printing by taking blank paper from the printing room
Image credits: u/UrPokemon
Reddit user UrPokemon has recently posted a story on the Malicious Compliance subreddit—a subreddit dedicated to “people conforming to the letter, but not the spirit, of a request”—about how he and his roommate took an unconventional way to getting 500 pages of blank paper for free from their university. Completely legal, no stealing involved.
To give you context, the university in question has a policy of letting each student print out 250 pages per semester for free as part of their attendance. This should be used for things like assignments and projects.
Since the Reddit user and his roommate have their own printer, they ended up not actually using their share of free printing. Instead, they figured they can simply go to the printing room and redeem the 500 pages between the two in blank letter paper. Seems logical, right?
They couldn’t & were asked to go through the proper channels by printing something… which they did
Image credits: u/UrPokemon
Well, apparently, under this policy, the school actually meant that the paper is for printing only and not a quantity of letter paper that the students were entitled to. This is where their student out-of-the-box thinking kicked in and they figured they’ll follow the rules as written.
The two students went to the computer lab, sat at two of the computers there, opened up a blank Word document, and printed that. Yes, a blank document, collated and neatly stacked, 500 pages.
They then proceeded to collect the “printed” paper and to walk out with it. Nobody batted an eye about it. In fact, nobody noticed. In his own words: “There has not been, and there will likely not be any fallout.”
This just goes to show how clever and ingenious students can sometimes get. The story went viral with other users sharing their own stories from when they were students or teachers and lightbulbs struck.
Since the story went viral, a number of students & teachers shared their genius tricks to get free printing…
What are some of your student-time stories? Let us know in the comments below!
I just see a massive amount of waste here. Power = carbon and paper = lost trees. Did you really need all that or were you only interested because it was "free"?
They had their own printer. Saves them from buying paper.
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"Malicious Compliance" subreddit, eh? Sounds like my next stop on the internet today.
Petty af. Are they really going to use all that paper? Plus it still went through a printer, blank or not, so it's a waste of energy consumption and resources. If they can afford their own printer I'm sure they could afford a ream of paper. Did they give a thought that they literally wasted a tree just to be prove a point?
I'm all for ingenuity, but printing 500 sheets of paper must be about 30 minutes of effort to save $4 vs buying your own ream.
You don't know how poor and desperate college students are...
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As a tutor for my college, we are given unlimited printing to help the students that come in for sessions. The rest of the students have to pay 5 cents per page. I always tell my students "If you have to print out essays or anything for study tools, put it on a thumb drive and bring it to me, I will print it out." It backfired one day when a student had the professor send him an answer page for the problems in his Accounting Book. I didn't know it was ALL the answers for the entire semester. 126 pages later....
We had to pay to print and copy at my college ($0.10 b/w, $0.20 color). I ended up taking pictures with my phone of information from books in the library and printed everything at home.
You do know, that 500 pages of Premium Quality paper costs around $5, don't you?
I live in Mexico and, in a casual conversation with a friend, found that the teachers were printing parts of books, since there weren't enough for the students, and paid for them out of their own pocket. The minimum wage here is.......$4.00USD a Day! The teachers make almost nothing. It kept nagging at me. I've been so blessed in this life. I bought a printer, 10 cartridges and tons of paper and donated it.....that was 4 years ago and I am still introduced as "the man who donated the printer y paper"....lots of hugs always follows. Reading this I am appalled.
At least none of these students is printing "Paris by night", which is just a full black page. Times 500. On the account of a teacher who left her computer unattended for 10 minutes without locking it.
The big famous webshop delivers 500 pages of paper to your doorstep for about $10. I think it says a lot about a student if they go through lengths to get their remainder of $5 worth of paper. Just buy your own can of milk and bad coffee and with that you already save more by not going to the Starbuck on your campus. (both things are also polluting less).
If it's a benefit of their tuition, why shouldn't they get the benefit of it simply because they want to print from a different machine? They already paid and, considering the state of student debt and that the interest compounds, that benefit is worth every penny for them. They absolutely should get what they paid for regardless of how much it would cost to replace it outside the scope of tuition.
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Yer that all sounds fine ....... paper cups in California, now that's a problem though!
I just see a massive amount of waste here. Power = carbon and paper = lost trees. Did you really need all that or were you only interested because it was "free"?
They had their own printer. Saves them from buying paper.
Load More Replies... "Malicious Compliance" subreddit, eh? Sounds like my next stop on the internet today.
Petty af. Are they really going to use all that paper? Plus it still went through a printer, blank or not, so it's a waste of energy consumption and resources. If they can afford their own printer I'm sure they could afford a ream of paper. Did they give a thought that they literally wasted a tree just to be prove a point?
I'm all for ingenuity, but printing 500 sheets of paper must be about 30 minutes of effort to save $4 vs buying your own ream.
You don't know how poor and desperate college students are...
Load More Replies... As a tutor for my college, we are given unlimited printing to help the students that come in for sessions. The rest of the students have to pay 5 cents per page. I always tell my students "If you have to print out essays or anything for study tools, put it on a thumb drive and bring it to me, I will print it out." It backfired one day when a student had the professor send him an answer page for the problems in his Accounting Book. I didn't know it was ALL the answers for the entire semester. 126 pages later....
We had to pay to print and copy at my college ($0.10 b/w, $0.20 color). I ended up taking pictures with my phone of information from books in the library and printed everything at home.
You do know, that 500 pages of Premium Quality paper costs around $5, don't you?
I live in Mexico and, in a casual conversation with a friend, found that the teachers were printing parts of books, since there weren't enough for the students, and paid for them out of their own pocket. The minimum wage here is.......$4.00USD a Day! The teachers make almost nothing. It kept nagging at me. I've been so blessed in this life. I bought a printer, 10 cartridges and tons of paper and donated it.....that was 4 years ago and I am still introduced as "the man who donated the printer y paper"....lots of hugs always follows. Reading this I am appalled.
At least none of these students is printing "Paris by night", which is just a full black page. Times 500. On the account of a teacher who left her computer unattended for 10 minutes without locking it.
The big famous webshop delivers 500 pages of paper to your doorstep for about $10. I think it says a lot about a student if they go through lengths to get their remainder of $5 worth of paper. Just buy your own can of milk and bad coffee and with that you already save more by not going to the Starbuck on your campus. (both things are also polluting less).
If it's a benefit of their tuition, why shouldn't they get the benefit of it simply because they want to print from a different machine? They already paid and, considering the state of student debt and that the interest compounds, that benefit is worth every penny for them. They absolutely should get what they paid for regardless of how much it would cost to replace it outside the scope of tuition.
Load More Replies... Yer that all sounds fine ....... paper cups in California, now that's a problem though!
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