Office Space
+1 for the Office Space video
'Printer Ready'. Er… you actually want to print? What, right now?
Whirr whirr click. Oh come on, print, dammit. Bzzzzt. Whirr click [silence] brrrrrrrrrrr [silence]. Why is it that an office printer manages to churn out pages day after day without delay or complaint, yet chooses to play silly buggers the moment you are in a hurry? Eh. Phut. Click. The green activity light is blinking …
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Friday 29th January 2016 10:21 GMT Thecowking
Re: Office Space
I looked this up once, when I saw PC LOAD LEGAL or something similarly.
That random word after LOAD, is a page size you've never heard of and will never use willingly. However something random in the emergent malificence of your network has added to your document, so your printer thinks it needs it.
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Friday 29th January 2016 10:58 GMT Snivelling Wretch
Re: Office Space
The "A" paper sizes are actually rather wonderfully thought out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size
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Friday 29th January 2016 11:04 GMT DavCrav
Re: Office Space
"The "A" paper sizes are actually rather wonderfully thought out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size"
I mostly read from that:
"A is a logical system that is used by every country in the world except for the US and its satellites (Canada and Mexico). They use some other ridiculous system that originated God-knows when and isn't very helpful at all."
I then realized that, in this sentence, 'A' was a variable, and did not refer to the paper system in particular, but to many systems and situations.
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Friday 29th January 2016 11:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Office Space
"wonderfully thought out" in a very German-mathematical way <G>.
Actually, from a pure graphical layout perspective, they are not. You will rarely see something professional, a book, a printed image, etc. in pure A4 format, for example, because the dimension ratio is not "right" for the eye, and contents that please the eye. So usually A formats are trimmed to something else. Unluckily printers usually print (when you're luckier than Dabbs), but rarely trim.
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Friday 29th January 2016 11:41 GMT Peter Gathercole
US Letter
Once, in the early '90s, when I was creating an APAR for a particularly obnoxious setup problem for an IBM printer on AIX, I was accused by the US support team of wanting to set an 'obscure' paper size as the default, rather than the 'standard'. The size I wanted was, of course, A4, and the US had set a hard default of US Letter.
After some fruitless to-ing and fro-ing, I suggested that they either climb down from their ivory tower, or re-christen AIX as the "American Interactive Executive".
This got me flamed for my unprofessional remarks in the problem management system, which came back down the management chain. I appealed back to my management chain in the UK explaining the scope of the problem, who thought my comments were, on the whole, rather restrained.
I actually got an apology, together with a thorough re-working of the factory defaults in the 4019 laser printer, a fix to the printer setup prepended to the print job by the driver, and a re-work of the nroff and troff device defaults, effectively fixing the problem in three different places!
Sometimes support processes work, sometimes they don't.
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Friday 29th January 2016 12:34 GMT Peter Gathercole
Re: US Letter
I actually enjoyed the job back then.
It was a time when people in the UK could actually influence products, rather than what happens now, just complaining to support reps. in whatever-is-the-cheapest-location-this-year, and getting completely ignored because complex problems upset their call statistics.
I find it rewarding identifying and overcoming complicated problems! Does that make me odd? (No, on second thoughts, don't answer that).
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Wednesday 3rd February 2016 14:41 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: US Letter
I find it rewarding identifying and overcoming complicated problems!
I, too, once did that to AIX in the early '90s (tracked down a bug in the standard C library implementation that broke 3D rendering on the advanced graphics adapters, of all things). It's good work if you can find it.
Have a thumb's-up.
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Friday 29th January 2016 11:13 GMT Peter Gathercole
PC LOAD LETTER
This means that you've (yes, you) f***ed up the page size settings in the page layout of whatever-app-you're-using.
Unfortunately, there is plenty of scope for this, especially if you rely on documents crafted piecemeal from many sources by cut-and-paste, because many office products will also keep individual page settings if you plagiarize other peoples documents in large chunks.
Mind you, I think that the first step in teaching office package use should be setting up default page size, dictionary and keyboard settings (huh - you got no training! Shocking).
I have to admit that whenever I use certain dominant desktop OSs, it really bugs me that it no longer seems to be the case that you can set these things up on a personal basis in your profile, and that many applications appear to want to remember what you used last time, rather than work from the defaults.
Yes, I know the last time I used A***e Reader to print some handouts I printed two-up, doublesided, tumbled and flipped on the long side. That doesn't mean I want the paper copy of my tax form printed the same way! What a waste of paper!
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Friday 29th January 2016 11:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: PC LOAD LETTER
I often trace issues to:
1) Administrators installing the printer without configuring papers sizes and trays correctly
2) User installing drivers themselves because administrators don't deliver drivers and don't set drivers defaults correctly
3) Office users utterly unable to use proper designed templates, and recreating company documents usually borrowing from another one possibly from an oversea colleague using a different paper default
4) Printer cleaning and maintenance? Do you mean it's also a mechanical device and not a purely electronic one and sometimes needs to be cleaned?
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Friday 29th January 2016 11:35 GMT Prst. V.Jeltz
Re: PC LOAD LETTER
LDS,
yes those are the real reasons, but has anyone ever wanted a printer to anything but print on A4?
All printers should have a button clearly marked "Quit bitching and print on any fucking paper in any tray you you can find mutherfucker becasuse its all A4 and thats what size I want ,and I want it now, I dont give a fuck if you are running low on ink just use what youve got NOW , on the paper I have just given you"
Those weirdos who want A3, or envelopes, will have to learn to configure the printer.
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Friday 29th January 2016 12:08 GMT Smallbrainfield
Re: PC LOAD LETTER
Prst. V.Jeltz
Our current office printer actually offers to print your document on whatever paper size is currently loaded. On the negative side, it will happily default to whatever is in the manual feed tray, (especially if you happen to have left some very expensive paper in there).
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Saturday 30th January 2016 08:01 GMT allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
Re: fan fold
Oh yes, fan fold... and a "NLQ" capable 24 pin printer, not a bad combination. Unbeatable for forms with carbon copies. (Which technically were not carbon copies. The paper for the copies had microscopic bubbles of ink embedded in it which were smashed by the impact of the pins on the topmost page.)
Problem(s) however: 12" is only almost 297 mm (aka the length of DIN A4).
12" length fanfold paper = cheap as dirt. DIN A4 fanfold paper = hard to find AND insanely expensive.
For some printers, DIN A4 was an exotic setting. For some, 12" was an exotic setting.
For some software, only DIN sizes existed. For some software, only US/non-metric sizes existed.
You could end up with a combination of printer and software that meant YOU were the patch - meaning you'd print one page, then give the wheel/tractor a tiny adjustment and print the next page.
</4yorkshiremen>
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Friday 29th January 2016 12:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: You forgot...
5) Trying to print from Microsoft Visio.
Well, I may be a luddite here but I think the print dialog is one of the few things Microsoft actually managed to get reasonably right compared to OSX.
Here is the most reliable way to get someone hooked on the most powerful drugs available or, failing that, snort most of the toner out of the printer: print a PDF using Adobe Reader on a Mac, using a non-default page size like SRA3 (basically A3 with a border for cutting).
I'd keep the straightjacket ready, and not because of the 50 shades of grey toner they'll be soon covered with..
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Friday 29th January 2016 13:03 GMT Laura Kerr
Re: You forgot...
"print dialog is one of the few things Microsoft actually managed to get reasonably right"
I agree with you. Every other MS Office component has a clear and well-thought-print dialogue. Visio is the exception, needing a lot of fiddling about to get a large drawing to shrink on a page. You have to do this, then that, then t'other and then it'll print, unless it won't, or maybe not or something.
If I'm in a hurry to print a Visio diagram, I paste it into an A3 Word doc and print that.
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Saturday 30th January 2016 01:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: You forgot...
Visio is the exception, needing a lot of fiddling about to get a large drawing to shrink on a page. You have to do this, then that, then t'other and then it'll print, unless it won't, or maybe not or something.
If I'm in a hurry to print a Visio diagram, I paste it into an A3 Word doc and print that.
LOL. Why is it that Microsoft kept the one annoying thing about Visio that needed fixing, but removed every other possible timesaving aspect from the GUI in its 'improvements'? It's been like that from before MS bought it to stop them from developing a Linux version..
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Monday 1st February 2016 12:37 GMT Roland6
Re: You forgot...
If I'm in a hurry to print a Visio diagram, I paste it into an A3 Word doc and print that.
I find myself doing that (cut-and-paste into Word) quite a lot with Excel spreadsheets, where getting the results table to sit 'nicely' on an A4 page can at times be too much effort...
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Monday 1st February 2016 12:50 GMT Roland6
Re: PC LOAD LETTER
> I often trace issues to:
6) A document that was originally produced in LETTER (or a Word document that contains a section sized as LETTER) and the application refuses to obey the "scale to fit" setting.
7) Application developers who don't understand users outside of the USA want to use a different default page (ie. A4) to those in the USA, hence when their application installs/resets it should configure it's defaults accordingly.
8) Printer vendors (eg. HP) who have hard coded LETTER as the page default and so every time a user installs the driver, or creates a print/scan profile they had to change the page size from LETTER to A4...
The scary thing, is that A4 is a new paper size, it was in widespread use decades before MS-Dos was thought of. Hence to still be having problems over something that is relatively trivial in 2015...
I predict a similar problem with driverless car's; vendors and developers will hard code defaults to driving on the right...
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Friday 29th January 2016 15:46 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: PC LOAD LETTER
LDS:
5) Someone originates a document in Word on the PC (using A4) that, when loaded in Word on a Mac somehow mysteriously defaults back to letter whilst proclaiming that it is still setup as A4. Until you print the 200 page document at the last minute and end up having to press "continue" between every sheet.
Not that it's happened to me. Honest.
And it's not even reliably repeatable - sometimes the documents work, sometimes they don't. Quite possibly an insufficency of chicken blood involved.
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Friday 29th January 2016 12:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
adobe reader
last time I used A***e Reader to print some handouts I printed two-up, doublesided, tumbled and flipped on the long side. That doesn't mean I want the paper copy of my tax form printed the same way!
dont get me started on that bloated pile of shite. Adobe have managed to make a simple application that should be about as complicated as notepad into an incomprehesible mess more complicated than a sharepoint server. Obvious functions like print , save , zoom , move are just buried under mounds and mounds of useless shite that no one will ever use. Its only recently that a modern machine with gigabytes of memory and more cpu cycles than a vintage Cray can run adobe reader without dying, in fact just installing it and not using it would kill the average machine. why the fuck does it need to have an updater constantly running? personally if an update came out and i didnt find out until i next ran the reader app do you know how bothered i'd be ?"none at all" . like the bulldozer.
Fuck them. fuck them in their stupid clown shoes. Im never installing it again
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Friday 29th January 2016 16:52 GMT Alistair Dabbs
Re: adobe reader
Speaking from personal experience, the genuinely nice people who work at Adobe simply won't be told. Any attempt to point out the ridiculousness of its application UIs is regarded as negative feedback and summarily dismissed. Any attempt to draw attention to the many, regular and frankly immense failings of its cloud-based systems is treated by them as the product of irrational hostility and, again, dismissed.
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Friday 29th January 2016 22:34 GMT Sandtitz
Re: adobe reader
"Any attempt to point out the ridiculousness of its application UIs is regarded as negative feedback and summarily dismissed."
I don't think that's exclusive to Adobe...
I've seen many otherwise excellent coders who have also done the shitty UI themselves and consider all negative feedback to be a personal attack against them and their pet hamsters.
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Monday 1st February 2016 16:52 GMT AndrueC
Re: adobe reader
Speaking from personal experience, the genuinely nice people who work at Adobe simply won't be told.
I noticed during the summer that one of their Reader software updates didn't put the utterly useless icon back on my desktop. Sadly it came back with the next update. Who the hell do they think actually needs the Adobe Reader icon on their desktop?
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Saturday 30th January 2016 17:28 GMT Whiskers
Re: adobe reader
I think it was the latest version of Adobe Reader that intervened when an aged relative recently tried to print out the PDF magazine that was attached to an email. "I've never seen that before. What have I done wrong? How do I 'select PDF file'? Why?" A large part of the screen space was taken up by a lot of stuff totally unrelated to the task of reading or printing a document.
I spent a few minutes gazing at the screen and eventually spotted what looked as though it might be a printer icon and tried clicking on it. A printer settings dialogue appeared. "That never happened before. What is it? I have all my printer settings the way I want already". Poked around a bit and found the settings that would get double-sided colour printing and then thought I'd look at another 'tab' in the dialogue; discovered the paper size settings which were helpfully defaulted to 'English' but didn't list any of the paper sizes normally found in England - a right click offered other measurement options including 'metric' which thankfully included A4 so I selected that.
Had to use the Alt and arrow keys to shift the dialogue box far enough up the screen to see the action buttons at the bottom (relative has the Windows 10 screen text and icons size set to 'maximum' which is a possibility not catered for by some of the people who design dialogue boxes) and finally clicked on 'Print' and actually got a reasonable print-out. "What did you do there? Why? How?"
I'm sure Windows software design is getting worse.
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Tuesday 2nd February 2016 06:55 GMT SamJ
Re: adobe reader
In my case it won't matter whether I use letter, legal or A4 - A***e Reader won't print anything. I am in the position that I have to create reports to .pdf files - and the latest versions of this GDed software won't even print from my machine (Win7 Pro, Dell). No matter what I do, it tells me that I haven't chosen any range or file to print - even after I have. Cannot even print the whole GDed file. @)(&$)(&*$@)#@)(*($*$#)(*@$&@)(*&)&*&)(&*@)(&*@)(&&^_~%)*(&!~+_()!@~#%$&(&*. (That's called self-censorship.)
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Friday 29th January 2016 12:16 GMT Ian 55
Re: Office Space
I quite miss the HP Laserjet II and III printers that used to say that if you'd accidentally not sent the right set of codes saying 'use A4'.
There have to be some still going: they were almost indestructible. Amongst other things, this meant that when businesses got rid of them to get an LJ 4 (ok) or later (not), you could buy them for about £20, or about 1/20th the price of new crappy model from someone else and even less of their original cost.
The printer I have now prints more pages per minute, and at rather less than 60lbs is much easier to move, but really doesn't have any other advantages.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
