Printer Roulette
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At work, everyone used to have their own printer. Typically a cheap HP inkjet, although there were a couple of laser printers, usually in places like HR and Shipping where they have to print "important" documents. Then management decided we were spending too much money on all those printers, so they took away everyone's printer and leased some copiers that could be connected to the network and double as both copier and printer. And it wasn't too bad, except for the obvious problems. The inconvenience of having to walk down the hall to get what you printed, and occasionally when you get there you discover that your one page is waiting in a que behind three other people who have decided they need to print 100 page documents. But I don't do a lot of printing anyway so it was a fairly minor annoyance.
Until one day, I needed to make a lot of copies for a project I was working on. So I'm standing at the copier, making copies [insert clip of Rob Schneider from SNL here] when suddenly, weird pages started coming out of the copier along with my copies. Apparently, the people who designed these machines never considered the idea of someone printing a document at the same time that someone else is making copies. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, much hilarity ensues as pages from a variety of people are randomly inserted amongst the copies coming out of the copier.
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Do people where you work really print a ton of stuff all the time?
I mean, I never print anything at all, so I'm curious why everybody needed their own printer.
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@dhromed said:
Strange, I was about to ask the opposite - do they print enough for it to be worthwhile centralising the printers? If you can pick up a decent enough inkjet for £25 (or rather, 100 the same), plug them into spare USB ports, and roll-out the drivers, you have to be doing quite a lot of printing before the consumables make it cheaper to buy a half-decent business printer-copier - ignoring such things as set-up costs, support, and so-on for the centralised printer.Do people where you work really print a ton of stuff all the time?
I mean, I never print anything at all, so I'm curious why everybody needed their own printer.
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@El_Heffe said:
Until one day, I needed to make a lot of copies for a project I was working on. So I'm standing at the copier, making copies [insert clip of Rob Schneider from SNL here] when suddenly, weird pages started coming out of the copier along with my copies. Apparently, the people who designed these machines never considered the idea of someone printing a document at the same time that someone else is making copies. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, much hilarity ensues as pages from a variety of people are randomly inserted amongst the copies coming out of the copier.
How were you copying? The printer/copier isn't going to mix "jobs" (typically, it'll either separate the output by a inch or so in the tray to make the separation obvious, or use a second output tray if available), but if you were copying in an ad-hoc way without creating a single copy job, then it might mix results. Where you using the document feeder, or just putting in page 1, hitting copy 20, page 2, copy 20, page 3, copy 20, etc?
In short, I doubt the machine was the problem.
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@dhromed said:
Do people where you work really print a ton of stuff all the time?
I mean, I never print anything at all, so I'm curious why everybody needed their own printer.
I used to work in a place where it was a political "status symbol" thing to have your own printer. Even if your office is only 10 feet away from a consolidated laser printer. So in addition to the 20 or so IBM InfoPrint 1400-series (really just re-branded shitty Lexmarks with the shitty card enabling them to talk to the shitty AS/400) and HP 4000-series printers, we had another 10-15 crappy inkjets to maintain. It sucked.
