It takes a village

To quote Hillary Clinton, apparently it takes a village to fix a printer.

Yesterday afternoon, not one, but two of the printers that my group uses when kablooey. One printer only printed out blank pages with like a line of gibberish on top, the other printer had a document stuck in the queue, so that no one else could print.

So like any good Executive Assistant, I called the help desk. By the time I got through all the prompts, I was exhausted. Then came the ten minutes of answering questions from the guy on the other end of the line, after I got disconnected and had to call back and go through the whole prompt thing again.

They made fixing the printers a high priority which was great. Then came the waiting. Finally a technician on our floor showed up. More questions were asked. Then he went away. He came back with another guy. They looked at the printer. They left. Two more guys came and looked at the printer and then left. Finally the first two guys came back and looked at the printer. In the meantime, the printer still wasn't working.

Finally at 4:00 p.m. another guy showed up and started asking me more questions. I showed him the printer queue on my computer that showed that someone was printing something that was jamming up the printer. He had me call someone on the phone about the printer who was supposed to be working on the problem from her end.

I spent a fruitless minute playing interpreter between the two of them before I finally handed him the phone. And the printer still wasn't working. Neither of them. Because I had to open two seperate tickets for the printer, I have no idea when anyone is going to come and fix the second one.

The upshot was that finally this morning the printer is working. Which is great because I needed to print 50 more pages of my manuscript to read and revise and it would have sucked if I hadn't been able to do that.

But here's my question: why did it take like 8 people speaking printerese to fix this printer? It's like that old joke about how many [fill in the blank] does it take to screw in a lightbulb.

And all the printerese they were talking, like I had gotten a degree at APEX Tech and knew what they were talking about. Hello, I own a crappy $75 ink-jet printer. I know nothing about huge laser jet printers apart from how to change the toner, and apparently that takes forever to do here since the mail clerk guy has to be summoned to do it.

And my second question is, if you send something to print, why not go and pick it up? Is the document going to walk itself to your desk? And if it hasn't printed after about ten minutes, why not delete it from the print queue so that other people can print?

Apparently this is just too much work or too technical for some people.

Oy!