In case you hadn't noticed, Xmas, aka The Holiday Season as it is known down at Wal-Mart, is almost upon us. As ever, it is a time for good cheer, good will to all men and a good skinful of alcohol followed by an attempt to reproduce a likeness of one's buttocks on the office photocopier.

Of course, it's the stuff of legend that the photocopier's glass plate then has to break, jamming the machine with a half-resolved image of someone's backside while they explain to unimpressed A&E staff why they need 63 stitches in their arse on Xmas Eve.

What Canon means by "non-work-related" mostly revolves around the aforementioned "rear-end copying". Engineers report a 25 per cent increase in emergency call-outs over Xmas, and 32 per cent of the long-suffering copier Flying Squad has at some time repaired shattered glass.

Mind you, there's more to a Canon engineer's life than extracting a grainy likeness of Maureen from Human Resources' posterior from a wrecked, beer-soaked machine. Midlands-based David Salt explained: "I had to repair a machine after a customer had held their pet cat down on copy glass and copied it," while Dan Hunt of the South West admitted: "I had to repair a machine that had its copy board glass smashed at a military base. They eventually admitted that it had fallen out the back door of their Chinook Helicopter."

Items retrieved from ailing copiers make interesting reading too: mice, a sleeping cat, spiders, a crab, a swarm of bees, a cockroach, a snake, a kitchen knife, a sausage roll , stockings, dominoes, and a cheque for £6,000.

Ah yes, and a vibrator and a condom. Now that must have been one hell of an office party. ®

Bootnote

We understand that Canon has recently increased its glass plate thickness from 4 to 5mm, and accordingly expects a reduction in arse-induced failure. No, that is not an invitation for drunken pressure testing. Behave yourselves.

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• Xerox: Web 2.0 coming to a grey box office soon (7 June 2007)
• Canon to recall personal copiers (13 September 2006)
• Xmas parties: avoid sex, drugs and booze (7 December 2005)
• Ecommerce boom for Xmas (24 November 2005)
• Wal-Mart employee fired for Christmas email (18 November 2005)
• Vibrating buttocks key to driver alertness (6 September 2005)
• Don't photocopy your bum this Xmas (19 December 2002)