Would you like to be electro jogged?

When a sheet of paper comes fresh out of a printer/copier, its ink hasn’t completely dried. It contains a lot of static. And is frequently hot to touch. Thus, it is not ideal for post processing.

Enter electro-jogger.

An electro-jogger or a paper jogger is a device that dries the ink, dissipates the static energy, and removes the heat. This leaves you with a stack of paper ready to be put through binding.

The way it works is quite simplistic which I guess is a sign of all clever technique. You put the stack of freshly printed paper into the machine’s drawer-like holder. Switch it on and it starts rocking the stack at high frequency while making a dulling drrr sound. In a few minutes, the stack is ready. Remove and repeat with the next stack. How ingenious is that?

I found out about this machine from John Green. In his video he says that perhaps he too would like to be electro-jogged.

And I immediately took note of it. It’s an idea I have held in my head for years. It wasn’t surprising but it was pleasant to hear someone else mention it.

Disk defragmentation - that’s where my idea takes root. Back in the days of Windows 98/XP, when it felt like our computer was slowing down, we’d go to Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter and let the computer rearrange all its data for the next couple of hours.

Watching the multi-coloured bars rearrange themselves into nearly monochromatic stacks was probably the top meditative experience of my childhood.

The disk is a crucial component of the computer’s brain. Everything that the CPU processes begins and ends with the disk. All memories are stored on the disk, read from the disk and written to the disk. No disk, no memory, no real point behind computation. You could have a powerful CPU that can easily wrangle poorly organised data, but even the most powerful of CPUs would struggle with an inefficient disk. If you want efficiency, you want a good disk. A neatly organised one. One with largely continuous monochromatic stacks. A disk like that is going to give you a performance boost like nothing else.

That’s what I seek. That’s what John Green seeks. Perhaps that’s what we all seek. Our brains are all over the place. We are struggling for words, our vocabulary is decaying, we are forgetting recipes that we invented, we can’t for the life of us remember appointments and tasks, all events appear as a singular blur, we know how the tune goes but we don’t know the words, we remember her face but we can’t recall her name.

We aren’t stupid. We are just a little slow.

We need a human electro-jogger.

Perhaps the meadow of no worries has one.