Posted on 09/27/2020 7:09:29 PM PDT by nickcarraway
MAYBE IF I PRINT EVERYTHING IN CAPS?
On Call With the impending weekend comes another tale of courageous souls dispensing the balm of technical knowhow to those who know not. Welcome to On Call.
This week's Regomised reader is "John", who spent long decades at the sharp, pointy end of technical support.
His story takes us back a quarter of a century, to the headquarters of a national agency where he was the sole technical support person and tasked with keeping everything ticking over, from Novell servers to those newfangled Windows 95 desktops.
"I had one client," he told us, "who reacted loudly when anything stopped working."
Anyone who has never experienced this particular breed should step forward now and hand in their "knows a bit about IT" badge, since dealing with such creatures, their shouty voices, and ALL CAPS EMAILS is a rite of passage for many.
One day, however, the protestations seemed justified: "The only printer for the entire office suddenly quit."
Repeatedly clicking the Print button unsurprisingly failed to coax the HP LaserJet 4 into doing its job. The user therefore did what came naturally and sought a member of IT (in this case John was IT) to blame.
The user "stomped over to inform me of the issue," he sighed. "It's hard to say how many people could hear," he said, but we imagine those in neighbouring towns were suddenly aware of the problem.
John popped over to the user's desk, suspecting a bad job lurking in the print queue or shenanigans in the spooler. He had no joy; clearing the queue and sending a test print didn't help. The PC could definitely "see" the printer – a swift ping confirmed the thing was alive, but nothing would come out of it.
Drivers back then lacked the smarts of today, so John's next port of call was the printer itself. Perhaps it had jammed. There was an alternative, but surely no user would be so lazy?
He popped open the tray in search of the blockage and found…
…no paper had been loaded.
Popping in a ream of paper cured the problem, and the grateful HP device resumed its spewing. "Back in business," John proudly told us. The demon of the empty tray vanquished.
The user, however, had followed and, seeing that the printer was once more printing, asked what the problem was.
No doubt seeking to preserve the mystique of the IT industry, John told us: "I vaguely implied that power-cycling the printer and reseating the paper tray had reset the paper detection," rather than slap the user around the head with an empty paper packet.
This hack always found himself muttering something about having to reseat the flange rebate valve when a user wanted to understand the "magic" behind a visit from the power-cycle fairy.
"Given the embarrassed expression on her face," he said, "I'm pretty sure she saw through that explanation, and she never came to my desk again."
Ever solved a silly problem, but spared the user from office-wide embarrassment with a convoluted explanation for "you forgot to turn it on", or perhaps you were the one that couldn't be bothered to refill the printer? A special place in The Register's On Call archives is but an email away. ®
Did you wave a dead chicken at it?
Kicking it might wake it up.
he should have used a Technology Without An Interesting Name to run his printer.
I'm retired now. Same to you.
RE-BOOT? works with mine . . . . kinda’ like it needs an enema.
A daisy wheel printer will give you very crisp text and the ribbons are cheap.
Geto Boys makes everything better.
No, but I have been the embarrassed one.
I knew that would be posted! I just KNEW it...:)
Perfect reference.
"I'm all done here...it was a standard computer problem, the ID-10-T error."
Some day soon I will be doing that to my Epson printer.
You are low on ink.
That’s ok, I only want to print in black.
Can’t do that, you need some cyan and yellow.
And since you don’t print something every 20 minutes you will need to do a complete nozzle cleaning procedure.
Nice to know I’m not the only person who uses this approach when dealing with technical difficulties.
Snort!
Ahh, the pain of printers. Those of us who dealt with them in the early days...circa 1992...
ME: Uhhhh...I cannot get my printer to print...it chops off half the page, and starts on the next page...
HP SUPPORT: Okay. Sounds like a printer driver issue. We can send you a new driver. The floppy should arrive in about two weeks.
ME: Uh...okay.
(a month later)
ME: Its here! I’ll be able to print with my new printer now!
(Printer spits out half a page of truncated text all smashed together)
PHONE CALL TO HP: The support time is now four hours and 23 minutes. Please wait on the line...
I have an Epson printer too, I know of what you speak.
I’m not in IT, but even I’ve solved a few doozies.
A couple techs were trying to send a particular file to a printer. NOTHING was working. Standard file format. Not very large. No weird fonts. Nothing complex in the file itself, like doubly embedded image files... So they call me.
“Have you tried changing the file name?”
“Change the file name???”
“There might be a character in it that the printer doesn’t like. Give it a super simple name, like ‘test’ with no caps.”
“Okay...”
File sails through.
...
Sometimes people wiill try to push a whole file through for an hour or so and get nothing without ever having tried to isolate the problem.
“The file won’t print!”
“Will it print _anything_ from the file?”
“No!”
“###... Okay, let me drive...”
I skim the document and see if there are simple pages to print. I do those to see if they’ll print. Then a batch of pages. Once I find the bum page, it’s usually something not built or set right. A bad font. A messed up table. a corrupt image file. An image that’s too complex... Making it right clears the log jam.
...
Fonts used to be a killer. One computer that crashing intermittently was set right by deleting forever a bad font from the user’s library...
“That’s one of my favorite fonts!”
“Replace it with the same thing from a reputable type foundry! This free knockoff you’re using will be the death of your computer!”
On my analysis I reasoned that the sensor that detected a jam for the paper path was stuck. So before I did anything, I explained that famous scene in that classic Bruce Willis sci-fi movie Armageddon where they got stuck on the space station and the computer refused to allow them to detach from it.
The Russian astronaut who was the sole member on the station, just totally went berserk and grabbed the biggest monkey wrench around (about 5 ft long) and yelled to Bruce "Well let me show you how we fix things in Russia!" and proceeded to whack the computer with blows from this huge wrench - the computer rebooted and allowed the spaceship to disembark!
So now as I'm faced with this malfunctioning printer, I proceeded to do the most unusual repair I've ever attempted in my 30yrs of fixing computers - I simply held it on both sides and banged it on the desk 3 times.
It beeped, whirled and did a internal reset and self-diagnostic. When it finished with its self-check, I just loaded some sheets of paper in the paper tray, and all was back to normal - as my friend look on in incredulity and her mouth dropped wide open!
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