Our copier is acting up, and is jamming every third or fourth page. But every time I open the drawer, nothing is jammed. NOTHING!
Our printer is already partially broken; doesn’t feed things through the tray properly. Today it decided to take a four-page document, which I was printing for the second time, and print it in gibberish. Literally, every letter is a symbol. The document was in Acrobat, so I know I didn’t accidentally change the font.
My computer is the one that fed the stupid document into the printer in the first
place.
And the postage meter, while not actively broken down, doesn’t like to perform teleset (putting more $$$ in) unless I run over halfway through and press a button to tell it is OK to continue. (Would you like to continue? Y/N)
Okay, I know you’re here to rant and blow off steam, but I have some advice for you, anyway. Are you fanning the paper properly before putting it into the copier or printer? Paper cutting machines cut a little too cleanly, and fanning the paper helps the copier to pick it up easier. Your pick-up rollers may need a cleaning, too (they almost always do). See, if the paper isn’t getting picked up quickly enough, the sensors that expect a piece of paper in a certain time period interpret that as a jam, even though there isn’t one.
Is your office really dry and staticky? That can also make it difficult for the printers and copiers to do their jobs properly.
As for the printer printing gibberish, I believe there are fonts in the printers as well as the ones in the documents, and that can lead to the printer getting confused. This one I’m not too sure about - anyone know anything about this?
The postage meter - sorry, you’re on your own. Maybe it’s possessed.
I think it’s just about time for me to watch Office Space again.
Office Space is a great reference when it comes to stupid office situations.
When our printer at the office acts up I always poke at the buttons, stop, then say “PC load letter?? What the fuck does that mean?”
I also named a report for one of our clients the “Traffic, Program and Survey” report. I sent an email (memo) around the office with an attached coversheet to use on the report.
This may be too late but one thing that works around here is turning the stack of paper over. There is a defintie top and bottom to paper and sometimes the copier doesn’t like one side for whatever reason.
In addition to the comments the others have made (dirty rollers can do strange things, there is a right-side up for packs of paper, etc.), make sure the cable from your computer to your printer is seated properly - it won’t take more than a lost or garbled character or two to make your printer go totally strange if the screwed up characters happen to be commands to the printer.
I’d bet that the printer is using a PCL driver instead of a PostScript driver. There is a known conflict between PCL and Adobe documents; it’s what causes the fonts to come out in symbols or other-language characters. If you know how to change the driver, or if you have an IT person who can do it, you might see if that works.
Yes, that can be a potential problem, but in my limited experience what’s usually happened is that the computer, for whatever reason, has changed the default printer when it sent the document to be printed. Some software can be incredibly stubborn about having the office update it’s hardware: you can change the system default printer, and still have some applications continue to send the data to the new printer in a code the OLD printer used. This can be even more confusing if one uses a computer to print to fax or uses several different output devices on the same network or computer. My first guess is that somehow or other Acrobat ended up sending the document to the printer while it was formatted for a different machine.
