Printers can seem like pretty simple tech until something goes wrong.

So, what would you do if five brand new printers all started having the same problem? Would you assume they just needed driver updates? Or would you think the motherboards needed to be replaced?

In the following story, one IT employee finds himself in this scenario and would’ve never considered the latter. Here’s what happened.

At least someone was honest at the end

This one starts with printers. I know, it’s a tech support tale about the most universally loved and cherished pieces of computer equipment, but here we are.

I worked as the tech support guy in a company where having your own printer was a status symbol, rather than using the big shared printer. My attempts at making that sane fell on deaf ears.

The weapon of choice was a very entry-level black-and-white laser from a major tech company. Eventually, that model was deprecated, and a new one that looked almost the same was released. We bought five and replaced some beaten-up ones.

The printers had issues.

These printers almost immediately encountered a problem: at random, they’d print the job as raw control codes instead of what you’d expect.

I wasted one afternoon trying various drivers. The ones that got auto-installed in Windows did it, and the same with the PCL driver, which was often the savior in various forum posts, but nothing helped.

I spent the next day with the tech support. Naturally, they tried to send me on a wild goose chase with Windows reinstallations and installing updates, but I had already tried it on a fresh machine, and it obviously wasn’t that.

Tech support was basically no help.

Much to my amazement, I managed to make this issue also happen with a Linux workstation, so it was most likely in the printer’s firmware.

The tech support suggested I upgrade the firmware. There was a tool on their site, and I wasted more time trying to get that working. No matter the OS or any of the five printers, the firmware upgrade tool never wanted to upgrade the darn things.

It, however, had a newer firmware available. On my next call to their support, they finally agreed to send someone to look at the printers.

Finally, someone showed up to fix the printers.

A couple of days later, a guy shows up, and while I normally let the repair guys do their job, I had to hover behind his back to see what exactly I did wrong with the firmware upgrade.

Much to my surprise, the guy breaks out a screwdriver and pops the thing open. He then replaces the whole motherboard and does it to all five.

I had to ask what that was about. The guy helpfully tells me that, yeah, you can’t upgrade the firmware on these things. It was a security upgrade that completely prevents the firmware tool from working. He also knew very well about the issue that specific firmware was having.

Somehow, this left me loving printers even more.

Wow! It’s good someone finally admitted what was going on.

Let’s check out if the readers over at Reddit have ever encountered anything like this.

This sounds like a printer problem.

Here’s someone whose dad worked for Xerox.

For this person, every brand has given them problems.

According to this comment, printers should have better management tools.

What a frustrating situation! There’s nothing worse than wasting time trying to fix a printer.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.