Send printer ink, please. More again please, and fast. Now send it faster On-come again to On-Call, The Register’s Friday column in which readers share tales of tech support oddities. This week, meet “Sam” who told us that back in the 1990s he had a job as “a fledgling tech support/programmer/whatever else was needed.” Sam’s employer “was the supply point for a number of others, most of which were …
In my country you can generally cash cheques, provided that you bring them to the branch where the issuer's account is, the amount isn't too high and you show your ID. If there's any doubt, the cashier can verify via phone with the issuer.
Source: that was my job until a couple of years ago.
We had a cheque printer. Being an investment bank it was in its own secure room and the paper stock and ink were all kept in the room. Physical security was very tight. The couple of selected staff with access to the room looked after keeping the printer fed with ink and stock. Other than that their job was to take the printed cheques out of the printer and put each one folded into a windowed envelope so the name and address printed below the cheque was visible. Unfortunately the printer was on the network and anyone who knew the printer name could send whatever they wanted to the printer and get a cheque for almost any amount delivered to an address of their choice anywhere in the world.
> the printer was on the network and anyone who knew the printer name could send whatever they wanted to the printer and get a cheque for almost any amount delivered to an address of their choice anywhere in the world.
So it was an early incarnation of one those "set your own salary" schemes.
There was a story in an early 1980s electronics magazine article about "computer crime" which related how one "enterprising employee" (in the 1970s) discovered that if you hit the repeat button when the payroll system was printing a cheque, it would reprint the thing.
He sat there hitting repeat for an evening whilst it was printing his paycheck and apparently only got caught when he tried to bank them all at once.
I once had a customer who called to say that whenever he wanted to print an expense report, a timesheet came out as well, on the same page, all mixed up with the expense report. I did a remote support, checked his computer to make sure he hadn't set any watermark or anything, I checked his printer driver. Couldn't find anything. And then I remembered a) how stupid people are and b) the sort of things people do. I asked him "were you having problems earlier with printing the timesheets?" and he answered "why yes! I did have problems with the formatting, how did you know?".
I then asked "so you printed several copies of your timesheet?" "Yes".
So I further questioned him: "And you put the paper back into your printer to reuse the other side?" "Yes"
So I said "Well, you put the paper in the wrong way round, nd just printed over it!"
His reply: "How on earth did you guess that?". "Just a hunch", I replied.
Something very similar just yesterday... client had inadvertently printed a 120-page document so was chucking the paper back in the tray while it was ongoing.
I got connected at page 109!
They then wanted to check that things were printing properly so tried another document and complained that it came out with 'other writing all over it'
I had to explain very carefully what had just happened...
Last week, one of our printers was jamming every few pages - really unhelpful, to say the least. I was checking the rollers and poking around for half an hour before noticing that in the paper-in tray, half of the sheets had "page 2 of 2" in small type in one corner.
Someone had somehow printed dozens of nearly-blank pages, and just thrown it all back in the tray. Since it had been through the printer process, the surface of the paper had been altered and things were slipping when the printer tried to pick up a sheet.
Since it had been through the printer process, the surface of the paper had been altered and things were slipping when the printer tried to pick up a sheet.
The heat of a laser printer is more than enough to drive off some water from the paper and thereby alter its handling properties. (It's less of a problem for photocopiers because in general they aren't as hot inside.)
We replaced the companies IBM Typewriters with AT&T PC's running Displaywrite 3, the Xerox laser printers would print unevenly if the paper was damp, the toner didn't fuse to the paper, the typists would put in 1/2 a ream of paper and leave the rest out on the desk. To keep the paper dry we built a wooden box to hold the paper that had a 20 watt light bulb to keep the paper warm and dry. We never thought about fires ! worked great.
"chucking the paper back in the tray while it was ongoing."
Laser printers really don't like this, it was bad enough when duplexing manually, but the risk of jams and drum scratches is why we put locks on our paper drawers.
Whilst shopping for replacement high volume printers a few years back i found that no suppliers will sell you the printer and toners, but all work on a per-page charge.
This is because in the past they found that customers would do all sorts of stupid things to "save money", such as pouring the waste toner back into the input hopper and reusing paper.
Even worse, a number of educational institutions would charge students separately for paper but let them supply their own.
The service techs explained that over the years they'd removed wallpaper, wrapping paper, brown paper bags and heavily overprinted sheets of paper out from those particular gummed up systems.
What annoyed me the most is when a printer is out of paper and someone opens a new ream, takes 20 sheets, puts that in the tray and leaves the opened ream sitting around where it invariably ends up soiled. The trays hold an entire ream (some drawers hold 3000 sheets, not just 500) and there were signs on the equipment telling people to add whole reams only.
In the end we gave up on allowing users to feed the printer but the final straw and what prompted the locks was when continual jamming one Monday morning prompted a tech callout, which turned out to be a very expensive fuser replacement on an £18k printer because someone had poked a screwdriver into the works during the weekend and damaged the rollers.
We'd already had a number of instances of holes being punched into transfer belts on smaller colour lasers (HP 4700 and 5500 models). The staff are all well qualified and highly intelligent however a number of them are proof of the thesis that obtaining a PhD frequently involves the surgical removal of common sense.
@anthonyhegedus
Your experience with this particular luser reminds me of a bit from the BOFH:
The user who wanted to know why the ’follow-me’ service wasn’t working on her phone was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back. It took a while for the PFY to realise she was carrying her desk phone around the building with her, but as a veteran hand at these things I expected no less.
Most of us have run-of-the-mill stories along the lines of, 'I left a transaction open for 30 minutes and brought the main application to its knees' [1] or 'I re-installed the wrong server, left the company without the ability to bill for a day or two and got fired', which aren't really great stories.
There are only so many extraordinary stories that can be told, and many, I suspect, would interest both the company in question as well as the authorities. And we expect a happy ending too — I wiped all of our backups and got promoted, this sort of thing.
The former kind of stories should be sent in confidence to Simon Travaglia. I'm sure that there are a lot of actual shenanigans that would make great BOFH plotlines, without anyone needing to incriminate themselves.
[1] Transactions are trouser-flies: you make a painful mistake once, and you never, ever make that mistake again.
I have just had a suit made. The trousers have a button fly and no belt loops, so can only be worn with braces. The only braces I have are red. I think it looks amazing and in no way do I resemble a reject from Rainbow. I might accessorise the suit with a Ford XR3i or mark 2 Golf GTI.
Then ask for two more bottles, uncorked. One for your cellar and one to keep the customer happy/quiet.
It is because of dickheads like these that now we have to fill out ever more paperwork for a simple meal ... like, who was attending ? Oh, I see, what was Y doing there ? Why did you have Cognac ? Three beers each at the pub after that, why ?
When a $400 night out managed to secure $200k more in new contracts for an existing client ... whatever, does not matter, we still have to answer stupid questions like that .... Merci, hein! It is easier to bullshit a customer who has downed one too many ... then again, according to our customers, our ROI is actually very good, so ... but I digress ...
"It is because of dickheads like these that now we have to fill out ever more paperwork for a simple meal"
Well if you like that one, you'll love the one about the French customer who was so arrogant that if they spotted a supplier in the same restaurant they'd walk out without paying and tell the waiter to, "just charge it to that table over there."
You may well be remembering the story of a jobbing actor who was staying at a seaside boarding house, and (with the knowledge of the landlady) was enjoying the charms of her daughter on a nightly basis.
His bill at the end of the week included a substantial charge for "extra vegetables"...
(Can anyone identify this story more precisely, please?)
For a while we had a customer who would take us out to lunch on his tab - he liked a big meal and a lot to drink, and realised if he took people from the software company maintaining his company's system (i.e. us) then he could claim it all on expenses. And he was senior enough that nobody would question it.
Sadly it came to an end when it was found to be the main cause of projects overrunning, particularly fixing the mistakes caused by drunken and/or hungover programmers.
..of mass computer printing, the line printers of the day used ink ribbons.
These impacted an oily ink into the paper fabric which was hard to remove. At one point in my career I used to try this professionally....
When laser printers came in there was a move to these. But laser printers work by baking a carbon dust ON TOP OF the paper, and the hard carbon ink shell can easily be shattered with a scalpel blade and a delicate hand. The resultant dust can be brushed off, and a new character substituted.
This is why you use special papers and inks for cheque and receipt printing...
"When laser printers came in there was a move to these. But laser printers work by baking a carbon dust ON TOP OF the paper, and the hard carbon ink shell can easily be shattered with a scalpel blade and a delicate hand. "
It's way easier to get toner off paper. I have to wash my hands after handling laser printed paper.
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