I was in vacation in Guadeloupe, trying to rent a bike on a small island, when the guy at the rentals asked me what I was doing for a living. I stayed vague and just said I worked in IT but it was enough to move the conversation about his broken printer and the fact that he had to buy a new one. He asked if I could take a look at the broken one, I replied that I was on vacation, and he said that it wasn’t very nice of me. There was no language barrier as we both spoke French natively, but I’m socially awkward and maybe it was just a joke. I’m still not sure if he was just making small talk, or expecting me to check the printer.
I obviously didn’t, and I recommend touring the island of Marie-Galante on a bike, it’s worth it.
I was the printer goddess of my office. All I did was change the paper default from Letter to A4. I could also change the toner cartridges.
For when you don’t actually want to damage the prop, so you kick it in away that no human has ever kicked anything ever before.
Also it’s hilarious
I still sport my old Think Geek T-Shirt: ‘No I Will Not Fix Your Computer’ to family functions.
The IT guy plight is real.
My go to was once it turned into troubleshooting I said “$55 an hour, that’s my rate”. If they said “why so expensive?” I’d follow up with “because I don’t want to do it.” Usually got a laugh and if they were actually willing to pay then they actually needed help, not just “why computer no computer gooder”
Probably made me look like an ass a few times, but I’m at the cookout, I don’t wanna work on your busted-ass Chromebook from 2013. I want to hang out, eat a burger, drink some beer, and not work.
“Haha that shirt is funny. Anyway I have this brand new 7 year old HP laptop and suddenly it’s all sluggish and when I try to open another chrome tab it freezes for a few minutes.”
My objection is the fact that it’s always the technophones that seem to have the most complicated technical issues. Like my mother who managed to uninstall the driver for the embedded fingerprint reader in her laptop,
Gotta update the back with
“And neither the printer will get fixed”
Shoot
First me then the printer
Printer first. Let the guy die with some sense of satisfaction. What are we? Monsters?
Its a WiFi inkjet printer you say? You haven’t used it in six months you say?
Please Shoot!
Such a plight. I sadly still have to do this on occasion for family. But I usually get a free dinner out of it.
9/10 it has been the printer got a new IP from DHCP and the idiotic phones/laptops still used the previous one. I’m hoping a DHCP reservation will keep me a bit more sane.
But don’t get me started on ws-print bullshit.
My inkjet is elite. It will do a perfect nozzle check several days in a row, then when I actually need to print something the next day, the black is clogged.
Mine would always refuse to print this black and white texture again because it was out of magenta.
Mine will wake up everyone in the postcode with it’s clonk-a-donk thwap brrrrrrrrzrzrzrzrzrzrzcrack fwip-rrrrrrr-fwip at any time of night but not even try to get an address from DHCP.
He looks like he works in IT.
I used to work as it support and i still have nightmares from the customers’ printer problems.
Eh I never minded. I preferred printer problems. Fixing the default printing source made me cool. Downloading a driver or pointing a user to the right network printer made me a hero. Replacing a roller or a fuser so the printer stopped jamming elevated me to legendary. Much more relaxing then fixing someone’s janky SQL “formula” because their “excel is broken.”
Yup. “My excel is broken” is nightmare stuff. Fixing a printer can be as easy as unjamming some paper or replacing a toner cartridge.
And when it‘s really bad, you at least know that you for real can‘t do anything and have to wait for replacement parts or a technician. So no procrastination about how to fix it while you should be doing other things.
Except the myriad of protocols and driver issues. Contemporary printer is, how you should not have implenented it, just because it was done like that in the 70s.
Seriously, why does my PC need to know how that piece of curses has to handle a pdf?
Looking at printers is how I got into tech maintenance
