Shred Room Printer

I sent this informative yet light and slightly crass email to my team at work today, inspired by an incident someone enlisted #5 to solve and upon saving the day I found the problem was #2 – it will make sense once you read the email. I think it may have been one of the first emails my team has gotten from me that lets my true personality shine through. Ah, it feels good to be free. Pity I can’t be so liberal with skill development and service note documentation I do for work. That would be… hilarious to say the least.

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From: Joanna Dickson
Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2008 2:31 PM
To: Onyx Email
Subject: Shred Room Printer

Rumor has it that we may be getting a new printer in the shred room… but until then, here are 5 questions to ask yourself before you fantasize about chucking it out the door:

1. Is the printer setting correct? Go to [File] and click on [Print] then change the name of the printer to the Hp Laser Jet something-or-other. It should NOT be on Microsoft Office Document Image Writer… that will get you nowhere except to a window that asks you to save something somewhere… and who knows what that will do.
2. Is the printer plugged in? Yes, it gets unplugged once in a blue-moon.
3. Is the printer ON? The power button is NOT on the front, it’s on the back near the power plug. The green button on the front is no button, just a mere indicator light to tell you if it’s on or not. Unfortunately it’s rather dim sometimes and misleading.
4. Am I giving it a moment to clear the printing cache? With every failed attempt to print something another document is added to the printing cache, a backlog of crap waiting to be printed. You can double-click on the teeny-tiny printer icon in the bottom right corner of the screen and it will show you the often enormous list of stubbornness in action. You can even right click on each print job and select [restart] if you are in doubt about whether or not the computer will ever get the job done. Just remember it won’t print YOUR stuff till all the other stuff is cleared out of that cache, so don’t be greedy.
5. Is Joanna at the office? If I’m here and you are ready to wrestle with that dang ol’ printer, give me a ring (on the phone of course… though I’m not too picky, I like sparkly stuff too). :o)

Enjoy your many adventures with the aforementioned beast of a printer!!!

Joanna E. Dickson

"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being." -Goethe