I'm a paper jam away from prison; or PIT YOUR WORKPLACE SHITPILE

The BBQ Pit
1

The copy machine at work is the bane of my existence, my cross to bear, my challenge to overcome. It is taking every bit of rationality left in me to not go home, get my gun, and off this fuckin heap of junk.

EVERY SINGLE DAY it jams up, takes the papers in wrong, and stops working. EVERY SINGLE DAY I have to listen to the BEEP BEEP BEEP that comes out of this thing when it fucks up. EVERY SINGLE DAY I spend about a half an hour attempting to fix this goddamn thing, since everyone else in the office claims they have no idea how to work on it.

Whatever company, I don’t even bother to look for fear if I find out I might mail-bomb their headquarters, made this machine should be shut-down immediately. No telling how many workplace incidences of violence they are responsible for by selling unsuspecting consumers their machine of doom.

That is all for now, if you have a piece of equipment that is meant to help but actually hurts you would like to vent about, feel free to join in.

2

Why does it say paper jam when there is no paper jam? I swear to god, one day I throw this piece of shit out the window.

PC LOAD LETTER? The fuck does that mean?!

3

Movie quotes aside, I actually do have a frustrating piece of office equipment.

This fancy Ricoh machine is a color laser copier, printer, and scanner all in one. It sorts, collates, and staples. It’s great… except that when it decides to go to sleep, it takes eight minutes to warm up. There doesn’t seem to be a way to make it stay awake all the time, so every time someone wants to print, they have to wait and wait and wait before anything even starts coming out.

4

I’m thinking I might take that new chick from logistics. Things go well, I might be showin’ her my O-face. Oh! Oh! Oh! You know what I’m talkin’ about … Oh!

5

Office Space is a great movie.

I forgot all about the fuckin warmup time of my heap-of-shit copying machine, thanks for reminding me! The frustrating thing about the warmup is that it says, “Ready to Scan”. But, when you push start, it takes all the copies, then says, “memory overload”. WHAT THE HELL? DONT SAY READY TO SCAN IF YOUR NOT FUCKIN READY TO SCAN.

6

Hmmm, I’m having trouble feeling sorry for you guys. I’m an antique furniture mover in between classes at the local university.
“Antique furniture” = “Hardwood armoire the size of a compact car.”

So, what’s wrong with your copiers again? Did they suddenly become 400 pounds, and you had to carry them up 2 flights of stairs??

Muffin!

7

Wow, that’s a nice self-pitying hijack!

8

I deal with a worthless xerox document center. every week the fucking thing asks for more toner, we don’t make that many copies! And another thing, where the FUCK is the bypass tray that needs filled? One day, I am simply going to set the thing on fire.

9

I’m sorry, is my self-pity too pitiful for the rest of the wanking in this thread?

I’ll come up with something better:
“WAH. My copier doesn’t like me, I think it’s racist/sexist/ageist/homophobic/discriminatory against the obese. WAH. Someday, I will purchase pre-packaged pine testicles from Ikea. WAH.”

Hehe, it’s all in good humour. I spent some time as an office intern, and it had it’s tough white-collar moments. :smiley:

10

Not exactly an equipment-vent, but I might as well take this opportunity to pit the MORONIC DIMBULB ASSHOLE AT WORK.

So let me spin this story for y’all: It’s 4:55pm on Monday afternoon. I’m all set to clean up my stuff and head out the door, and I plan to bolt the moment it hits 5:00, because my home’s 30 miles away, my son’s another 20 miles away, and if I’m to pick him up and get us home before 8:00, I can’t doodle around the office any longer than necessary.

So what happens? The clock hits 4:57pm, and Mister Clueless Office Asshole (not his real name) walks into my work area, says “Hey, I know it’s almost time for you to go, but I’ve got a problem.”

YES YOU HAVE A PROBLEM, YOU MORONIC FUCKWAD, IT’S THAT MOLDY PIECE OF CHEESE BETWEEN YOUR EARS. You could have seen me a half-hour ago, or you could have seen me tomorrow morning (this isn’t life-or-death we’re talking about), but NOOOOOOOOOO, you have to wait RIGHT BEFORE QUITTING TIME to drop a TWENTY-FIVE-MINUTE ISSUE IN MY LAP.

Unfortunately, while I was tempted to hit him over the head with a 21" computer monitor (CRT, for extra heft), workplace rules forbid such behavior, so I’m forced to plaster a fake smile on my face, look at his problem, mutter something about having to run, and leaving him to babysit the simulator for the next half-hour for me to look at in the mornng. And no, I don’t feel bad about making him stay late, since he doesn’t come in in the mornings until 10:30am anyway.

Sigh Fortunately, by judicious use of my sooper-secret warp engine, I was able to get myself and my son home only TWENTY MINUTES LATER THAN USUAL, even though it entailed a lot more stressful driving and running around than I’d care to use. All because of ONE CLUELESS DUMBFUCK ASSHOLE WITH NO SENSE OF TIME.

Next!

11

Almost all printer/copier paper problems are caused by worn pickup rollers, IMHO (and experience). Depending on your make/model it will cost you 50+ dollars to get them replaced. If you are really handy you can try cleaning the rollers with a rubbing alcohol solution… that may buy you some more time.

If you are dicking around with the printer for a half-hour/day it may be worth it. :slight_smile:

12

it means your printer driver is specifying American Letter size paper, but your printer was expecting something else (usually A4) - it should be possible to change the printer driver default paper size settings and the problem will go away.

13

I’d like to nominate Epson Stylus printers for room 101; they have some sort of sensor that detects exactly how urgently you need the page that you just sent, then goes into a cleaning cycle dance of proportional duration.

14

Hey, our big ole HP Colour LaserJet does that self-cleaning for 5 solid minutes, just when you give it something to do, too! Damn but it’s annoying…

It hasn’t happened to me for a long time, touch wood, but what used to drive me batshit was printing from Internet Explorer, then finding about a few letters of the right edge of text missing, makin- the tex- ver- har- to rea-. There would be a nice thick blank margin where it could have printed, it just frequently decided not to.

15

Once again, The Box of Random Evil …

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=188359&highlight=Random+Evil

16

To the OP: I feel your pain. Preach on, brother. (Or is that sister?) Preach on, OP.

I am cursed with not one, but two stupid printers. Way back when, during the last Ice Age, I was the person in the office who prepared designs for publications, so I was granted a gasp color printer. Marvel of marvels!

Now of course, this thing is as old as, well, a really old thing. It’s so old, it’s error messages are in Linear B, so I seldom know what’s wrong with its inner child and can’t provide any aid or succor. It takes about 23 minutes to print one page (in either color or plain old black and white text), and it has this trick of printing three pages, and then spitting out a blank one (it also takes 23 minutes of labor over that blank page). I routinely have to go through long reports and pull out every fourth blank sheet. Hey, at least it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it. The tragic Dance of the Dying Office Swan, but it’s still impressive.

My other printer is the plain old black and white kind, which I like to call the Ancient of Days (when I’m feeling frisky). This bad boy predates the color printer, even. Something has gone horribly, seriously wrong with the paper intake system, and it will only accept pages that are manually fed. One. At. A. Time. (I thought long and hard about using that one period per word cliche, and decided this was an appropriate case, because if you don’t come to a Full Stop after each page, the printer gives up the ghost all together). In the interest of full disclosure, once you get the groove of exactly when to force feed the sheet of paper, the Ancient of Days zips right along pretty quickly.

I can’t imagine how much of my work day is spent trying to calculate the most (ha ha ha hahahaha HA) productive way to print something. Naturally, most things are 50 page reports that my boss needs ASAP. Do I gamble with the manual feed? Do I invest the time to print one page per 23 minutes? What about the blank pages, will it take more time to pull those out than to stand hunched over the manual feed like a demented washerwoman from a Zola novel? Some things need the tag team action – pages with color charts sent to Color-Me-Badd, and the rest tearfully coaxed from the Ancient of Days.

The crowning glory of this whole situation is that I’m now the last in line for a new printer, because I have two. Some people only have one POS printer, I should feel lucky to have two.

17

Fuckin A everybody, thanks for the posts; I’m already feeling better about having to go in and face that demonic metal shitpile tomorrow.

Also rjung, thanks for the electronic library on your site, it has provided hours of enjoyment.

18

Can I complain about my coworkers? Please?

First, I have a coworker who told me I was un-American. I have a Pit thread about that somewhere.

Second, I have a coworker who keeps trying to save my soul for Jesus. Words cannot express how I feel about this.

Third, I have a coworker who is the nicest woman in the world, really, but she drives me batshit because she is legally blind and has no idea how our computer system works and is always asking me to do stuff that is literally impossible, and refuses to believe me when I tell her we can’t do it. She’s very passive aggressive about this and it makes me want to shake her.

My last day is the 25th. Yay!

19

Open letter to the Evil Shitbeast Printer From Hell:
Listen, you no-good waste-of-toner useless pile of crap, when I put a piece of paper in your tray, and tell you to print something, I want you to do it! I don’t want you to sit there with your proverbial thumb up your proverbial ass, pretending like you don’t got nothin’ to do. Oh, you’re SOOOOO bored. Oh, WHY doesn’t somebody give you something to print?
I DID, you addlepated jackass machine. I told you to print!

THEN, after about fifteen minutes of cud-chewing, the lightbulb finally lights. “Oh!” you cry, with jubilant discovery, “I have to print something, now!” Your mechanism starts to warm up. It is a promising sound, and I am reassured to know that some effing time today, I’m going to get the simple, one-page letter that I need to send out.

But alas! I am misled. For you are so smutty and befouled with the blackened souls of the damned, that you cannot correctly draw a piece of paper from the tray. So, you strain, and groan, and wretch, like a person in horrible intestinal distress. And then, when your cries have reached a fevered pitch, you shut down all together. “It is too much!” you sigh, as the orange Paper Jam Light of Death blinks on, “I cannot take it anymore.”

By this point (of course), you have already mangled the paper so thoroughly, that not ONLY is it unusable, but it is shredded in tiny bits strewn throughout your inner workings. So I am left to take you apart, piece by piece, drawing forth every last molecule of paper, before you will even THINK about printing anything again.

I hate you with a passion your feeble electronic mind cannot begin to comprehend. You are the focus of my every frustration and all my anger. There is no expletive strong enough, no profanity vile enough, to allow me to express my feelings toward you.

Beware, oh, Handmaiden of Satan, or one day, I shall dismantle you to remove a jam, and NOT put you back together again. I will scatter your components on the floor, and dance upon them, screaming obscenities, until I am hauled bodily from my office by men in white coats.

I will be institutionalized. But you will still be dead - your reign of terror ended forever.
Sincerely,
Kn*ckers

20

Our fax machines kill me. In our building, there are at least 4 of them, and they all work the same way. Badly.

Other fax machines I’ve used have neat little features, like telling you whether the fax number you dialed was actually connected, printing confirmation pages if you wished, and even re-printing the fax you sent, so you can get an idea of what the recipient will see.

Our fax machines here? None of that crap. You sticks in your paper and you dials your number. The pages are sucked through lightning-fast, and a little green light turns on. After a few minutes, the little green light turns off. You go away feeling sheepish and uncertain, knowing that the success rate of these machines seems to be about 60%.

Always nice, when you have critical things to fax. I’ve gotten used to calling the recipient and asking if they received the fax, which I never had to do with other machines.