Haunted By Printers

It's 2023 and I'm still haunted by printer tech support requests.

Apparently some print cartridges have you drilling a chip off a legitimate print cartridge and pasting said chip onto the replacement, somehow. A better world might run along the lines of "no chip, less hassle" in four inscrutable characters. But that would probably mean less profit for you know who, and who knows what would happen if there were more competition in the printer market.

Many years ago someone ran an iron-on t-shirt paper through a LaserJet; the iron-on paper melted around the fusor. Another moment was telling users that they could not use a USB stick that had too much capacity, because the very expensive Enterprise printer only supported USB sticks up to 2G. Said very expensive Enterprise printer also had dubious SSL support, like nothing modern nor secure. If you need a virt running an out-of-date browser to be able to use web interface at all… (and of course the web interface was crummy. Some printers at least could pull down a plain-text configuration file via TFTP on boot. That was nice: no dinking around in a bad web interface, trivial configuration of new printers of the same model, etc.)

Once, the printers started printing random pages with gibberish. Apparently the Windows worm du jour had caused a fit. Probably there were security bugs in the printers as well.

Impressive paper jams? Lots. High-speed printing means lots of paper in the print path when something goes sideways, and then everything fouls up. Maybe the jams are more frequent if inexpensive rollers and wear-out-able doo-dads are used. Not that printer vendors would ever stoop to using parts that wear out too quickly.

A particular vendor gained some dislike after a small model change introduced an incompatible plastic wedge on the print cartridge, so one had to purchase a new, different cartridge for what was minus the new annoying wedge the exact same thing. Maybe life would be better with a universal print cartridge standard?

At some point you might learn that PostScript files are software applications that get thrown at a software execution environment with a lot of moving parts. Assuming the application even gets there: print drivers, print queues, quota systems, billing, and whatnot can get complicated, buggy, and insecure.

Printers that shipped with hidden zip-ties in the paper path, and a service tech had to come out and fix that? Yep. Probably that was the new very expensive Enterprise printer replacing the old very expensive Enterprise printer. Meet the new boss…

I did miss the era of dust build-up that could apparently cause fires in some printers so maybe there was probably less daily maintenance necessary than in the more distant past. But not zero maintenance. Maybe a ticket system review found that around 30% of tickets involved printers at some point.

Dot matrix printers were very loud, but I have vague memories of refilling the print cartridges with ink, and certainly no troublesome clipper chips with DRM. Extension cards in some computers back then used a copper that you had to erase the corrosion off of now and then, so it wasn't no golden age.

Printing was less bad after there was too much money on some human genome grant so for lack of anything better to spend it on all the memory in all the printers was maxed out.