Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
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Printer Tracks

 delivers your document right to your cubicle!
  (+4)
(+4) 		  [vote for,
against]

Don't you hate when you print something and you have to WALK over there to pick it up? GOD, that can be SO ANNOYING!!! And sometimes you forget that you printed something and you only notice it there hours later.

This invention (actually designed by Leonardo da Vinci in 1504, but unusable because he had no printers to try it out on) picks up your completed print job from the printer, using a mechanical arm that descends from the ceiling right over the printer. This arm grabs the papers, then retracts back up to the ceiling, and the ceiling has little railroad tracks on it that lead to everyone's cubicle.

The grabber travels above everyone's heads, and then comes down over a designated place on your desk and deposits the papers. Then it goes back to the printer to work on the next delivery.

There could be plenty of grabbers in force at the same time. In an ordinary office network, the printer knows which person requested the job, and the number of pages, so correctly identifying the destination cubicle is not a problem.

—phundug, May 20 2003

ceiling robot http://www.halfbake...dea/ceiling_20robot
[phoenix, Oct 05 2004, last modified Oct 17 2004]

[link]






       Can it have a big comedy boxing glove to bop you one if you're wasting paper? +
—saker, May 20 2003
   

       Given that the average inkjet printer costs a mere $100-200, much simpler and much cheaper to put an inkjet on everyone's desk, keeping the departmental printers for large print runs. I've seen a bunch of enlightened companies adopt this approach.
—DrCurry, May 20 2003
   

       But then you wouldn't be able to have the boxing glove feature
—ProblemSolver, Aug 29 2004
   

       Damn it, I just had the exact same idea. Loads of grabbers carrying the paper down tracks in the ceiling, brilliant. Thank the HB search button! I could have been ridiculed!   

       Bun for being as astonishingly clever as me.
—theleopard, Oct 27 2006
   

       Bun only because the tracks effectivly make this a rail road and I generally auto-bun all railroad related ideas.   

       Note that the same system could deliver everything from deli sandwiches to "wake up" thumps.
—James Newton, Oct 27 2006
   
      
[annotate]
   


 

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