Here piggy piggy piggy

A miraculous recovery

So on Thursday’s errand run, we stopped by Staples so that I could try to get some good scans of my #Inktober drawings so that I could update my website and free up the originals to be bound together. The paper was too thick to go through the automatic feed on the scanner/printer, so one-by-one I manually put each page on the bed and pushed the series of buttons thirty-two times. It was tedious, but didn’t really take that long.

I had the girl at the print station counter run off some proof copies for me, grabbed my thumb drive, checked off that step and that errand, and moved on. They came out okay for the most part, but some of the areas that I had done in gray wash didn’t copy very well, so I had some touching-up to do electronically. We went on with our day, and that night I added a page to my website and posted on this blog.

Before I begin the story of the miracle pig, let me remind you of one of my Inktoberfest drawings, #12 in the series:

True stories all. I have a very bad habit of getting distracted and leaving stuff behind.

Anyway…

On Saturday, I went down to the studio and began preparing the Inktoberfest pages so that I could bind them into a book. I didn’t have a whole lot of margin on the left, so I scored each sheet (the paper is a fairly hefty 90#, bought for watercolor but not sufficiently thick for that) so that they would fold nicely when one opened the book. This involved scoring each page individually with an embossing tool about a half-inch from the left edge of the page and then folding the strip back and forth a little to give the paper a consistent bend. Thirty-four times (thirty-two drawing plus end pages).

Starting at the cover sheet, I made my way through chronologically, but when I got to 30, the next one was one of the blank end pages. I was missing #31! The prompt word was FARM, for which I drew a piglet a la Arnold Ziffel:

I knew immediately what I had done. The pig was my final scan and I had left it on the scanner bed at Staples two days ago.

I grabbed my keys and headed out. Time was of the essence.

When I got to Staples ten minutes later, there was a different person at the counter. I didn’t catch his name, and I hate to be judgmental about people, but for the purposes of this account and to impart my impression of him, let’s just call him Goober. He tried to be helpful, but my request seemed to fluster him.

“I was in here scanning the other day, and I think I may have left a document on the bed of that scanner,” I explained. “Do you have a lost and found or anything like that?”

He was stymied. “Gee, I don’t know,” he said gazing around the store. “I don’t normally work here, so I don’t know where anything is.” I could see little piles of paper stacked all over the place, and little cubby holes and cabinets liked the area inside the printshop area and all around the work station island in the middle. I was ready to tear the place apart, but I kept my cool on my side of the little swinging doorlet, but poised to barge through if it became necessary. He went to the other side of the island and took a plastic box from under the counter, the kind used to hold file folders. “Can you describe it?”

“It’s a drawing of a pig on off-white paper nine inches by twelve inches,” I said. “I don’t think it would fit in that box.”

He rifled through whatever was in that box anyway, then took out another identical box and began leafing through it. “Gee, well, if somebody found it, they probably just threw it away.”

That would not speak well towards my artistic skill, I thought, if someone took the drawing off the bed of the scanner and deemed it garbage.

“I just thought you might have a lost and found,” I said, brokenhearted. I could re-draw the pig in a couple of hours, I guess, but I wanted that one. “Thanks anyway.”

Just to be sure, on my way out, I checked the scanner bed and of course it wasn’t there. I didn’t see any wastebaskets, though.

But off to the side was a big blue garbage can labeled “Secure Shredding.” The lid was padlocked and there was a slit in the top about two inches wide. I peeked down in there and sure enough, there was my pig. He was under four or five other sheets of paper, but I could see his nose poking out and the word “FARM” in perfect Green Acres lettering. The can was about half full, so although I could see the pig, I could not reach the pig. The slit was too small for me to get my hand through, tried though I might, so I went back to Goober. He was already waiting on someone else, but I barged right in. “I can see it in the big can over there,” I shouted. “Where do you keep the key?”

“I don’t have the key,” he said, a little perturbed. “The service comes in and empties it.”

I returned to the can, tried again to squeeze my hand through to no avail. What I need, I thought, is Barb’s litter-picker-upper, the stick with the claw. Note to self to get one and keep in the van. In the meantime, back to Goober: “Do you have a yardstick or something that I could fish it out with?”

He was still waiting on the other fella, but he didn’t seem to mind. “Sure, if you think it will help.”

Using the beat-up wooden yardstick, I was able to slide the page out from under the others and got it on top of the pile. It was still a good eighteen-to-twenty inches deep in the barrel, so I tried to ease it over to the side, thinking that maybe I could shimmy it up somehow. The yardstick had a hole drilled in the end I was holding, so I flipped it around, thinking if I could line the hole up with a corner of the page, I might be able to flip it against the side of the barrel.

I did not see that the yardstick had was split on that end. Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps the Baby Jesus heard my prayers and decided to work a miracle right there on that yard stick so that I could retrieve my pig. I lined up the hole with a corner of the paper and the yardstick seemed to part like the Red Sea and grabbed the pig by the nose.

I was ecstatic, and Goober was gobsmacked. “You did it!” he exclaimed as I went galumphing back, yard stick held high and flapping my pig like a flag of victory.

I returned to the studio triumphantly and finished the task and started on the next step in binding the book.

I didn’t have to spend two or three hours drawing #31 over again, but best of all, I didn’t have to revise #12 with:

ONE INKED PIG
STAPLES

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