babbling blue

At work we have these giant Xerox Workcenter Pro scanner/copier/printer/etc beasts that do pretty much everything short of making you lunch (unless you’re on the Japanese porn star diet, in which case they do that too). The problem is, they never work worth a damn. They’re always jamming and getting stuck. The one on this part of the floor has had to be “reset” by the Xerox guy at least twice already this week. I know this because I sit about 12 feet away from it and I’ve heard him telling people that it was “. . . resetting, it’ll be about 5 minutes” twice. I can often hear the thing cranking away–”attempting to recover”, according to the display. It’s not clear what it’s attempting to recover from. My guess is a hangover. If these machines are secretly alcoholics, that could go a long way to explaining why they’re so dysfunctional. And loud.

I have a little HP printer at my desk, so I don’t need to use the big printer. I can live without it. I’ve heard that on floors where few people have their own printers that printing is a major problem. Even with my own printer, it still gives me grief (besides the noise) since I can only print to my desktop printer from one of my two computers. Also, if I want to print a big job or something that is double-sided, my little desktop HP just doesn’t cut the mustard. Or today, when I was trying to make copies and I was stymied by the printer’s attempt to recover. It’s been “reset” since then, so it’s probably working now. But I just don’t care anymore. Screw the copies!

Why can’t we get this right when it should be so easy by now? How long have there been these big network printer/scanner/copiers? It’s been years, certainly. And they are still so unreliable that we have a Xerox rep here full time to deal with them. Are they all that bad, or do we just have a bunch of lemons?

(As I was working on the little image for this post, the printer seems to have started to act up again, even after being “reset”. It sounds like it’s attempting to recover. . .)