printer god

So about a month or two ago, I  posted this blog entry: when you give a moron a printer. It was about me getting upset because I reloaded a paper tray in the library printer and had to wait for the past 40 minutes worth of documents to come out.  What really upset me was that, among those documents printed, I got three copies of a girl's bank information, including username, password, SSN, address, mother's maiden name, etc.

Today, the library has no extra paper available.  I've come to print a lot of stuff, and am sitting right by the main East printer.  It turns out that, while trays 2 and 3 are empty, tray 4 is stocked plenty full of paper.  The issue is that the printer won't default to tray 4; it always asks you to confirm skipping over both trays 2 and 3 before drawing from tray 4.

That's fine.  You just hit the confirm button a few times and it works.

But nobody seems to understand this.

So today, I'm the printer god.  I'm a deus ex machina, making sure your documents are successfully printed.

I even wrote a fucking sign, that looked like this (except in blue gel pen):

Hit the green button twice for your title page, then hit it two more times for your document.

I put this notice right next to the viewscreen on the printer.  The one that tells you to confirm going to tray 4.  But apparently people look at neither the bright blue screen nor my dark blue ink; they just get upset because their document isn't printed.  They don't notice the green "Attention" light blinking away furiously, begging them to look at the status on the blue screen.  They just sigh and whine.  So I reach over and double tap the button for them.

This all goes back to my idea that we should seriously be doing more educating in school about basic computer, networking, and printing.  Kids need to know this stuff.  CCIT wasn't even open in the library today, so there was nowhere to go for help.  People need to learn the basic operation of networks and peripherals, and they need to know how to interpret the controls of a basic machine.  They'll need to; our reliance on them is going up drastically, and will continue to do so.

So please, do a bit of practice with your own printer, scanner, et cetera.  Friends don't let friends be idiots with printers and networking devices.