Annoyed

[mustang84]

Well, it's 10:07 PM Central time here and I'm still at work because the damn plotter has been finicky (sp?) all night. I mean, I'm being paid to be here...but I don't want to be here. Argh...is it just me, or does technology sometimes seem like a step backward? I don't know how many hours of my life I have wasted waiting/trying to get things to print here and at college. I wonder what the average number of hours (or years) a person spends waiting on printers to print?

Anyone else have problems with things not working properly at their workplace?

[Flybrian]

PC LOAD LETTER

What the hell does that mean?

[CSpec]

My office has rediculously expensive printers, but jams still happen pretty frequently....arg....

[DetroitNut90]

The copying machine in my parents' office one day decided to leave burn marks on everything that it copied. A little while later, it decided to turn on and off at its pleasure, even if it was in the middle of a job.

The telephone in one of the rooms in their office decided one day to just start ringing non-stop at the loudest volume it could, even though there was no one on the line.

And my personal favorite:

Our first computer decided to erase the software my dad uses to do estimates for restoring houses after fire/smoke/water damage and every single file for every single customer he had up to that point after I installed a game on it. Man, was that an interesting week...

[trinacriabob]

The ones at work function fairly well, except when they are out of paper and you send something from your desk.

Now, at home, that's a different story. I have an HP 6110 All In One which I love. However, when I send something to print, about 25% of the time, it does nothing, shows that it's printing, essentially hangs up the printer (though not the computer) and I have to reboot and try to print again.

I have no idea what conditions cause this to happen. I was on the phone with HP during the 1 year warranty period a time or two, but to no avail. Still, it's a great product (print/copy/scan/FAX) for $ 250 or so.

[PONTIAC06]

The technology at my law firm hates everyone. The fax, copier, and two printers have more attitude problems than a spoiled teenager.

[zhawk]

Anyone else have problems with things not working properly at their workplace?

Yeah, some of my coworkers! Oh, you meant technology.

You should see the system we have here on base. If you want to print out most anything through our one system it runs through a server in the midwest.

I pretty much believe that someone has to hand carry the request from McChord to Kansas and then bring back the printed copy. It seems that slow.

Edited July 7, 2006 by zhawk

[lakefire]

My office has rediculously expensive printers, but jams still happen pretty frequently....arg....

163593[/snapback]

So does our office. It probably cost about 1/4 million.

It also has issues sometimes.

[76ChevyTrucker]

Our printers aren't "that" bad, they'll sometimes eat some paper and destroy some invoices, but overall, they do okay.

[zhawk]

Our printers aren't "that" bad, they'll sometimes eat some paper and destroy some invoices, but overall, they do okay.

163724[/snapback]

Now if we can get them to do that to our supervisors, we might have a party.

[76ChevyTrucker]

See, I don't have that problem with my supervisors. I can tell them what I want to do, and they can either approve it or not. I don't really complain, then again, I can't really complain.

[ToniCipriani]

PC LOAD LETTER

What the hell does that mean?

163592[/snapback]

I suppose you're talking about an old LaserJet 4 printer...

It actually says "Paper Cartridge Load Letter (Size)".

It happens when the paper detection flag is broken...

[aaaantoine]

The printer that the accountants use seems to stop working once a week, but that's mainly software related.

[Robert Hall]

I suppose you're talking about an old LaserJet 4 printer...

It actually says "Paper Cartridge Load Letter (Size)".

It happens when the paper detection flag is broken...

163754[/snapback]

This reminds me of the great scene in 'Office Space' with the printer..

I'm a computer guy....I enjoy working w/ computers, networks, and developing software, but I HATE printers. I have nothing but trouble with them...

At home, at work, and on the system my company builds printers seem to be nothing but trouble...our application sometimes has to print 30-50k documents at night at the client's site, and it's a monster commercial printer, but there are frequently problems with it at night--hardware, software, and with the Adobe rendering engine we use for PDFs... I'm glad I'm not on production support for it..

Edited July 7, 2006 by moltar

[mustang84]

We have lots of problems with file sizes being way too big. Some of our finished files (done in the worst program ever called Corel...how I wish we had Photoshop or Illustrator) can come out being 400 MB in size. The printer gets mad and will just sit there because it doesn't want to deal with that size of a file, so then you cancel it...but it doesn't want to cancel.

I've actually found out techniques to get around some of the hurdles, like saving the file as a TIF and then importing it into Autocad and printing, but it's still a pain in the butt and takes 3X as long as it should. The worst is when the boss asks you to print off one of these 400 MB files on 44"x34" paper for a meeting that's coming up in 20 minutes (like what happened this morning)...that's notgonnahappen.com.

[Sixty8panther]

As my buddy Robin would say: MIGHTY GAY!

[regfootball]

As my buddy Robin would say: MIGHTY GAY!

163914[/snapback]

next frame-making out.

[regfootball]

mustang- you work for architects, of course your printers are going to suck. architects know nothing about technology and never have money to make things work, nor do they assign resources to fix it right.

work for the evil real estate / contractor / developer with a big IT department and a contracted printing service and everything works beautifully!

one time at my old firm we had to run a full set on mylar for a library job....60-70 sheets. it was an old style plotter (maybe even a pen plotter) that took about 10 minutes per sheet. It took like a full day to get everything printed and babysitting to make sure no ink ran out etc.

now, bang out some pdfs or plt files, send em to the big machine in any of the 3 buildings.....sweet.

[ShadowDog]

Hand-feeding printer sucks DONKEY balls.

It's frustrating to watch the printer try to 'pick up' the stationary from the loading tray. We'll pre-enter our entire retail signage requirements and batch-print the whole operation from one sitting. This way, we can walk away from the printer and actually take a coffee-break...

...nope, it doesn't want to pick up the glossy stationary, so we must 'baby-sit' the damned thing, hand-feeding it one sign at a time.

The crappy thing about that is, most times, it does this. But there are times when file maintenance will arrive an hour early, just so they won't lose time hand-feeding...and then it decides to work fine, throwing the schedule out of whack because it's running an hour ahead of pace. That's when file maintenance ends up taking an hour long coffee break - and they'd rather be at home. I can't blame them.

Nothing wrong with the printer, I guess...it just doesn't like the stationary.

[Brandon Lutz]

My biggest problem with printers isnt them jamming, but having output ques just stop magically every day. It gets real old going into Horizon and resetting a print session because one of my users jobs just dies in transit.

AS-400 Stable my ass. Nothing but a P.O.S. It was cool in 85 but I-Series has no right to exist in todays world. Give me a proper server farm and printer pool setup on our back end processing side and I wouldnt have these problems.

[I hope GMRULES again]

I print for a living, average about 75k copies a day. The secret is a good quality American product like a Xerox machine, stay away from the low budget foreign stuff.

[z28luvr01]

The type and condition of the paper plays a large part in the printer's reliability. A couple of years ago we switched from name brand paper to brand-x lowest bidder recycled paper, and it would jam the printers every 3 pages. Once it was gone we went back to HP paper and things got a lot better.

It also helps to keep the paper in dry air. In humid conditions the paper will soak up moisture, which will cause it to jam in the printer also.