BOFH: Tenacious B and the Printer of Destiny
It's not a f*&%ing driver problem, mmm'kay?
Episode 10 "The printer's jammed again," the Director's PA says, ducking into Mission Control for a brief status update.
To be fair the PFY asked for this level of information when he suggested she notify him of any problems. As far as poorly thought-out pickup techniques this one has far outlasted his patience. The moment an orange light goes on, the whirring noise gets a little louder or someone suggests the air is a little bit 'ozoney' (my personal favourite) she's down here like a shot to give the PFY a heads-up.
Course after the first 20 visits the PFY latched onto the old faithful leave-me-alone excuse of: "Yes, I'm actively monitoring that with SNMP traps", but that didn't help because she could still beat a non-existent SNMP monitor to Mission Control, so then she started helping with the diagnosis of the SNMP fault. (ie, "Loose wire?", "No network?", "Wrong type of paper loaded?").
This would all fade into irrelevance except that she's also communicated our interest in the state of printers in general to the rest of the staff, who have now started emailing us about the state of their printers.
And let's face it, the quality of a printer is inversely proportional to it's distance from organisational power. So while the CEO has multicolour production quality monstrosity which can fax, scan, staple, bind, double side, laminate and make coffee, your average beancounter's 'laser' printer is an inkjet device which starts losing print registration about halfway through the original colour cartridge. And we'll make the poor bastard use it for three years before we replace it. (Again, as opposed to the CEO's printing unit which will be upgraded to the new model moments after he's printed the latest brochure about it. (single-sided, greyscale, unbound, unlaminated, unstapled and he'll get his PA to make a coffee).
So anyway, the Inbox at Mission Control is getting a little swamped with helpful observations about printing idiosyncrasies. So much so that I append another bullet point to the Company's anti-spam policy and direct emailers to it.
The Director's printer, though, is a whole different kettle of rats. It's going to have to be fixed. Luckily that printer is a per-page rental unit, complete with management card which allows it to communicate errors, printer status, toner levels and waster toner levels to the printer company so that they can ship new consumables and engineers as needed.
That said, the PFY and I have started to suspect that the management interface concerned is simply a randomly blinking LED and that the printing company just ships toner cartridges at us every month or so and bills us some large amounts of pages. Whatever it's doing, the engineer only turns up when you call them...
"It's a driver problem," he says, pulling a crumpled piece of A3 out of the guts of the printer.
"It's NOT a driver problem," the PFY responds tersely.
"Yeah, it is. If they update their driver it'll sort it out."
I bloody hate talking to printer engineers.
"HOW can it be a bloody driver problem?" the PFY asks. "It only jams on A3."
"Oh. It's probably a humidity problem - your paper will be too damp. It curls," he responds.
"No, we tried that - we got new paper, put it straight in, and it jammed," the PFY lies
"Oh. Well it's a driver problem."
"IT'S NOT A F***ING DRIVER PROBLEM!" the PFY says, losing his rag.
"Look," the engineer says, tapping in the secret code that they only use for maintenance and pulling 'chicks'. Sad, sad 'chicks' who are impressed by photocopier stories.
>bip< >bip< >bip< >whirrrrrrrrrrrr<.
"See, perfect," he says, holding up an A3 test page. "And if you go Print a Test Page from your printer it'll work too. Just not this printout - because it's a driver problem."
"How can it possibly be a driver problem?" I ask.
"Well," he says, looking around carefully in case undercover agents from another printer company (did I already say "sad, sad 'chicks'"?) is listening in. "There's a 10 mil margin around the page that you can't print into, because the printer was designed around the Egyptian A3 standard."
"The Egyptian A3 standard?"
"Yes!" he replies with thinly disguised disgust. "The Egyptians invented paper - and the paper standards. The Egyptian A3 standard is slightly smaller than the common A3 standard - because it's metric."
"Have you ever heard the phrase: 'Don't bullshit a bullshitter?' I ask, pulling out the cattleprod with a newly upgraded inverter."
"I... What's that?" our engineer asks nervously.
"This? This is a management interface. You plug it in and push the button and you get told the state of things. Admittedly it's not guaranteed to work first time, but after four or five goes it usually pays for itself. Or someone pays you to stop using it. Either way, it's money well spent."
"It's a driver problem!" he whines "NO! WAIT! If you update the driver the pages will print!!!"
"Somehow I don't think I'm getting the full story..." I hint.
"It... Chops the top off your pages." he blurts. "It's a design fault - the feeder pages are too near the toner deposition and so the page skews if you print too close to the edge. If you upgrade the driver it'll chop the top and bottom of your page off and print OK."
"Finally, the truth!" the PFY says. "So you'll be replacing the printer with one that works?"
"Yes, yes of course. But you'd have to sign up for another two-year term. And..."
"And?"
"You'd need to stock up on some Chinese standard A4. The latest printer uses the Chinese A4 standard. After all, they were the first people to use wood derived paper and they set the original standard for A >KZZZZEEERRRRRT<"
"Wow!" I say as the PFY and I help the engineer back into his van a few minutes later. "That prod is getting bloody warm. Do you think it's a driver problem?"
"No... THAT," the PFY says moments later as the van mounts the pavement and stops halfway into a bollard "is a driver problem". ®
COMMENTS
The school I work for suffer from all of this.
I've still yet to find a single model of printer that will take card of any non-flimsy value, or will print on labels or envelopes without spending more than it would cost just to start my own printing outfit.
And users don't get this. "I printed a label on this printer before" - yeah, but it's not supported, and these are different labels, and you've now stuck them all nicely to the internal rollers for me using the heat of the printer to set the glue. Thanks. Even had one do it with foil labels that turned out to be conductive. Ouch.
Printers stagnated decades ago and nobody can be bothered to fix them. My office has a Laserjet 4. It's actually BETTER than almost every modern printer in every way, except in terms of print speed (which hardly matters, really), and all the newer models are horrendous-looking, flimsy things that can barely handle a bit of paper, have horrendous custom formats and weird quirks and when they break you are stuffed. That's if you get that far without having to replace the drum, transfer rollers, etc. which cost more than the printer itself. And in six months, that model will disappear and be replaced with one with identical specs and completely different toners and drivers.
I'm really waiting for a Kickstarter project, or some 3D-printer take-off, so that we can actually have a large printer, that can print on just about any size or thickness of paper and can take literally a huge refill bottle of toner that's as big as a water cooler bottle and costs about £10 to refill. If we can get rid of the whole idea of drums and other consumables, even better.
The banner printer we have in school - can print A4-width "up to" 1200mm on their special paper. Completely useless and pointless and COSTS THE EARTH. Any old inkjet or even dot-matrix used to be able to print banners of A3-width as long as you could find paper for that length.
Printers have literally hit a barrier and then receded back in terms of features and quality, but not in terms of TCO over their lives. Hell, I know of a whole range of printers that I can crash by sending them a large image. The driver doesn't even bother to scale it down to printer resolution, it just sits and tries to send it direct to the printer for that to handle it. You can tie up the printer for hours.
A huge Ricoh model that we use also stops printing with a panel-error-message if you print Letter to it by mistake. The option is unskippable, you can't tell it to continue, and everyone else's job will just sit in the queue until you cancel the job (and, no, you can't tell it to pretend that the A4 paper in the tray is really Letter!) and after years of working with it I *still* haven't worked out how to reset it back from the manual-feed tray to auto-feed without just switching it off and back on. I actually installed PaperCut just to stop that damn printer from being fed Letter-size jobs (which are very common on PDF's, even those produced in the UK!).
Out of all the possible open-source gadgets we need, a printer is really top of the list. At least then I'd stand half a chance of fixing problems and being able to get "that odd little plastic arm thing that holds that bit down" from anyone for a matter of pence. And I could keep it running for DECADES just upgrading the interface / drivers each time they change.
Re: Proofreading please
Ahhhh, picking up on spelling errors in a BOFH article... That is very brave.
Now, could you lend me a hand calibrating this Management Interface?
I had that very printer
We bought 3 and put them on a research ship heading to the antarctic. Along with spares and service manuals and service software.
Ended up having to do all the A3 maps on a pen plotter, which was a tad slow, but I do like the way the light glitters off the ink. Much shinier than toner.
Watching a pen plotter trying to colour most of a sheet of very expensive paper blue was the only time I ever felt sorry for a machine.
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