Printers are the bane of my professional and personal existence. I’m not alone in this feeling as I’m sure anyone in IT or the unlucky person who sat by the printer 20 years ago can attest to. You can print page after page for weeks…even months before the inevitable issue comes up of “My printer is not working”. You either take the call or work on the ticket and spend hours just to find that after trying 3+ things that it “just started working” again…
I recently switched roles to another company dealing with multiple clients/businesses that we manage and within 2 weeks I was already in printer hell. I have always avoided printer issues where I could throughout my career, which I found out quick wasn’t the best move. Something about getting thrown into a seemingly foreign world of troubleshooting can be daunting and satisfying at the same time.
When printer issues come up there’s always that deep sigh within the soul, followed by the painstakingly grueling process of troubleshooting the issue. Inevitably you hit the printer doomsday wall of failure, BUT….I’ve found that if you push through this barrier and actually utilize printer documentation there’s really a lot more you can figure out. (who would have thought?)
This slightly condensed rant is really all to say as a reminder to myself, or anyone else really, to just take the needed time to understand what you’re working with. I’ve found myself too many times going in circles with what I thought was some kind of workaround or fix just to bring up the documentation and see that a manufacturer requires the OEM drivers to work properly and the users computer was using a generic print driver that was never designed to work properly.
**Bonus Rant**
During this printer week of hell there were at least 3 incidents where there were no signs of issues with printing and after running the built in Windows troubleshooter, it started working! Good ol Windows…