The TCM channel is currently featuring 9 to 5, and my wife told me I was nuts when I said I really wanted to watch the Xerox room scene, record and write about it.

She’s probably right.

For most people, 9 to 5 is remembered for its sharp commentary on workplace sexism, power dynamics, and the early push for women’s advancement in a male-dominated corporate world. Released in 1980, it arrived at a hinge moment. Carter giving way to Reagan. The Equal Rights Amendment still unresolved.

Important topics.

But for me, it was always the copier.

I was a “moron” running the Xerox machine.

That Xerox room scene captured something very real about the time. Before email. Before digital workflows. Before the internet was even a concept most people could articulate. Paper was the network. Copying was how information moved. We couldn’t imagine it any other way.

At the time, this was state-of-the-art high-speed document reproduction, what we simply called copying. Pure analog engineering, designed to move paper as fast as physics would allow.

And I can still hear it.120 clicks per minute.Two each second.Echoing in my head decades later.

I especially love the background details in the scene, like the reference to “Father Dominic” on the bulletin board. He was famous for Xerox ads in the early ’80s. “It’s a miracle!” It was a wink to an era when these machines felt almost magical. We almost had him come to our small print operation for the PR, but it never worked out.

This was all before personal computers were common. Mobile devices like the ones we carry today existed only as science fiction fantasies on Star Trek.

I wanted to work for Xerox. It was my professional goal. Our sales rep was the coolest guy I knew. Three-piece suit. Gold-rimmed glasses. Confident. Snappy. Working for one of the most innovation companies in existence

We also had our Xerox technicians, who were more like family. They kept everything running, no matter how hard we pushed the machines. There’s even a story about one of the characters in the movie marrying the Xerox repair guy. It didn’t happen on screen, but it says everything about how central these machines and the people who kept them running really were to offices and businesses around the world.

As a teenager, I fed a Model 9500, very similar to the modified Model 9400 shown in the movie scene. By “fed,” I mean constant monitoring. There were 50 collater bins, so 300 copies of a book or manual were required six runs. New “originals,” as we called them, were reloaded at regular intervals. Paper trays refilled. Interface reprogrammed.

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When needed, we ran 24/7, pushing close to a million copies per machine a week. These machines were beasts. If you knew how to polish or change a photoreceptor belt, string new corona wires, or replace developer and feeder belts, you were golden.

I learned all of that at Advanced Customer Training (ACT) at the Xerox campus in Leesburg, Virginia. I was eighteen years old. I was in heaven, surrounded by the most advanced analog copier technology in the world. I would later return to Leesburg for training on the Xerox 5080 engineering copier.

That same core imaging engine also powered the Xerox 9700 laser printer, a machine that quietly launched countless companies in the customer communications space. What began as the 9700 users group evolved into XPLOR, the “Xerox Printer Liaison Organization”, becoming independent from Xerox in 1983.

An entire ecosystem and a culture formed around moving information on paper at scale. But like the 9400 copier featured in the movie, that era faded with time and changes in technology. XPLOR ceased operations in 2025.

A lot has changed since 1980. Copying books and manuals now feels as strange as using a phone book. But the Xerox room scene fro 9 to 5 still sticks with me.

It reminds me how deeply technology and culture are intertwined and how profoundly both can change in nearly 50 years.

Any other Xerox room “morons” out there who can still hear those clicks? Love to hear your stories.

You can watch the full clip on YouTube here:

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