So I decided to print the manuscript for TGL early today, so I could miss the rush and all the people trying to use the printers, right? I load up the document, hit print, go to the printer.
And do a double-take: it’s missing. Not the printout, the actual printer, replaced utterly by a shiny new printer where the old one should have been. Reasonably, my printout should be here, though, yes? Reasonably, yes, but in this version of the real world, no. No printout to be seen. I suddenly realize that they’ve changed out the printers like they were threatening to do for all those months, but they never set up my PC with the new local printer. I apparently printed to the old printer address, to which a nearby printer no longer answers.
No big deal, though, right? I go back to my desk, expecting to find the print manager showing me an error, that the old address is no longer valid and would I like to cancel please? Instead, the print manager has already closed, which means that the job has printed.
Somewhere.
Just not here.
Getting slightly desperate, I call the help desk and ask them to locate where printouts to the old printer address would go, and, in typically efficient, forward-thinking and informative fashion, they have absolutely no clue where the old address now goes to, because naturally their operation is so thorough and efficient that a problem of the sort I’m describing could never have happened without it somehow being my fault. After considerable muttering they set up a ticket for me to talk to network operations so I can try to track down the printer.
I wait, and I wait, and I wait some more, and while I’m waiting I get a call from an extension I don’t recognize. Hoping it’s the aforementioned network operations group, I pick up to discover that I’ve answered an irate woman from the 5th floor (I work on the 3rd), wondering if I’m the idiot that printed out a 110 page novel on her printer. Aware that this has suddenly become absurd, I (perhaps inappropriately, but hey I’m ad libbing here) correct her, saying that the document is actually a partial novel rather than a full novel. Belatedly realizing I’m probably pissing her off by playing semantics so early in the morning, I elaborate that yes, it was printed erroneously, and yes, I’m terribly sorry, and yes, I’ll say five Hail Mary’s and go to Confession after I remove the offending document from her printer.
So I march up to the 5th floor to retrieve the aforementioned ream of paper in my best hangdog fashion. She’s not there, but in the interim she has kindly binder-clipped the printout for me, so I feel even more like a stupid oaf as I pick up the parcel, and slink back to my desk as obscurely and quickly as possible.
Upon my return, I see that network operations has finally replied to my request via email: they have courteously sent me the entire network printer map for the 3rd floor, thus managing to provide encyclopedic information for a question I hadn’t asked, while simultaneously failing utterly to provide any information actually pertaining to the original problem (which, in any case, is now solved anyway). A comedy of errors from beginning to end; I can honestly see Palin and Cleese adding just a touch of their own personal styling to the tale and turning it into a saga that would rival their infamous Book Shop skit.
Only two positive results came of this bizarre little episode. One, I have my printout. Two, I now know how to print prank messages on everyone else’s printer on my floor.
I expect both will come in handy.
February 26th, 2008 at 3:41 pm - Edit
It’s cursed, that’s all there is to it.
Ended up carrying a stack of paper the weight of a small tree trunk back to my desk and desperately trying to figure out how to leave the building with it XD
I tried printing it out at work when you first sent it to me.
Ends up printing out on the most used bulk printer in the company and doesn’t do it double sided like I told it to