The IT department got an angry Teams call from a staff member dealing with a giant industrial office printer, of all things. I took a unit of three people (not including myself) and brought the “crash cart” up to the accounting department.
This printer had to weigh around three hundred pounds empty. It had all sorts of annoying features and was who knows how old. If I remember correctly, it had two reserve paper stacks it could draw from; it could staple, it could hole punch, scan large sizes of paper, and could email the whole thing to your office… and it had a bad history with the IT department.
It started with the seventy billionth paper jam in the most inconvenient spots imaginable. The unreasonably sharp plastic didn’t help my colleagues or my hands either. We put it back together, and we got a software error.
We followed the manual that came with the beast and turned it off and on again. Now there was a jam somewhere else.
We disassembled the machine all the way to the location of the jam, and there was nothing there. Everything rolled freely, the sensor appeared to work, and we put it back together.
Paper jam in a different place.
This continued for a grand total of twelve paper jams that didn’t exist before the whole thing looped around again. Somewhere during that time, we lost a small screw in one of the gear sets. Fishing that out took a while, and one of my coworkers sliced the crap out of his thumb. He only left when one of the accountants nearly fainted at the sight of it.
More software errors, and an electrified screw later, we had it reassembled. “General error – call this number.”
We called the number out of warranty. The person on the phone won’t send anyone and can’t help us fix it. Throughout that whole ordeal, the accounting department had become a powder keg, and we were reaching 4 PM on a Friday. Everyone needed to either print or scan something NOW.
Suddenly, one of my colleagues put his foot through one of the plastic panels in frustration.
This gave me the idea of a lifetime.
I got up, dusted the toner off myself, and gave my boss a call. I explained the situation and expressed the urgency of this needing to be resolved tonight. We went back and forth for a few minutes while the last two technicians chased errors, and then it hit me. I asked if we had any mini all-in-one office printers left in storage. We did! I told him to mark the ticket as resolved, and I hung up.
I turned to the infuriated office workers who were starting to shift the blame to us for being unable to help. I told them that they would be given a personal printer for each of their cubicles, and it would happen before 4:30 PM. The look of relief made my day.
I told one of my colleagues to go grab the “hard reset set.” And I told the other one to grab all the printers from storage that he could fit on the cart. For clarification, we have a set of four hammers of varying weight we use to destroy hard drives with company data on them. We call them reset hammers.
When they both got back, I grabbed the biggest hammer we had and landed a huge blow on the face of the beast. I passed the hammer, and everyone took a turn at giving that wretched machine what it deserved.
The IT crew turned a blind eye, and we set up everyone’s personal printers.
We kinda forgot that printer murder was going on in the background as we wrapped up our last installation. With a lot of convincing, we got our hammers back.
We picked up the frame of that old hellish piece of junk, tossed it in the dumpster, and picked up the rest with a snow shovel. If you ignore the blood and toner on the ground, you may never notice it was missing.
On that day, an ancient enemy was defeated; we gained the respect of the accounting department, and nobody missed their deadlines.
