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When you work in tech support long enough, you learn that most problems are caused by users doing something wrong.

What would you do if you had a user calling in to report that her printer was ‘eating’ the signatures off of prescription cards?

That is what happened to the technician in this story, so he assumed that she was doing something wrong. When he got to the site, however, he discovered that she was right and it was being caused by the most unlikely of things.

I bet he never expected to deal with something like this. Read through the full story below and see what you think.

The Signature Eating Printer

I’m a IT guy in a small, provincial 3-location hospital group. I’ve seen some really hit-your-head-against-the-table stuff in my time here, but one of the most surprising stories is this one.

Working with people who don’t know what they are doing is hard.

Since the words “organization” and “logic” are unknown concepts for the people that lead these hospitals, there are many people who don’t have even the slightest of boundaries to the responsibilities of their position.

One of these people, lets call her [Ms. H], is vaguely responsible for all kinds of organizational controlling of Patients and Resources of one of our departments.

What does this even mean?

One day she calls us, and the following conversation ensues (not word for word, its been a bit of time since then):

[Me]: Generic and as anonymous as possible Greeting

[Ms. H]: Hello, I have a problem, my printer is eating Signatures.

[Me, flabbergasted] What ? Your Printer is eating Signatures ?

I’m not sure how a printer can eat only signatures.

[Me, still flabbergasted]: What exactly are you trying to do and why do you think the printer is eating any Signatures ?

[Ms. H] Describes the process of printing a prescription from our Primary Clinic Management Software onto template paper slips.

She clearly has no idea what is going on.

[Me, ignoring that she normally has nothing to do with writing prescriptions]: Well, that whole process sounds about right, but which signatures is he eating, and where are they coming from in the first place ?

[Ms. H] talking about unrelated updates to the software from a few days ago, completely ignoring my questions in the process

Sometimes, dispatching to the site is the only way to troubleshoot.

Since I can’t get any more useful information over the phone, I resort to paying her and her magic printer a visit. I grab my apprentice and we go over to her.

On the way, we speculate what the issue could be. From empty toner and the most inaccurate error description ever to a case of a complete mental breakdown, we thought up some theories.

Is this even legal?

As we arrive, we ask my previous questions again, hoping for more relevant answers. She goes on to tell us, that a Doctor from her department didn’t want to/had time to print all the prescriptions that he prescribes.

So, she gets a stack of pre-signed but empty prescriptions from him and then prints the prescriptions that he authorized onto these paper slips.

A printer doesn’t remove  ink, so this doesn’t make sense.

So far, so normally buffoonish processes. But nothing inherently wrong or error-inducing.

But where does the Signature eating happen? Right when the paper slip comes back out the printer. The previously already signed paper slip, suddenly has no signature any more. At least that’s what she is telling us.

Wait, maybe she isn’t crazy.

We still doubt her, since she is know to be a bit creative with reality. So, we make her show us the whole process.

She opens a prescription in the Software and prints it. The printer swallows one of the pre-signed slips and does his whole sound-rich routine, before giving back the prescription. To me and my apprentices complete shock and disbelief, the signature is actually gone.

Oh, this is starting to make sense.

We inspect the prescription. Over the field where the Signature was, a stamp was printed. That gives me an Idea. The software has two print modes, pre-printed and blank.

Pre-printed is the normal way to print prescriptions, since we use the aforementioned template slips. Blank however, not only prints the actually specific Text, but also the whole design and layout.

This is turning out to be a really confusing issue.

Maybe she somehow switched to Blank and is overlaying the not-transparent background of the design over the original one and the signature ?

Sadly, and to make us just more confused, that wasn’t the solution. We spent another half hour there, trying to fix the problem, until we got an idea.

Why would the type of pen used make a difference?

After printing prescription after prescription for different tests, the paper was hot to the touch when freshly printed.

While she did that whole process for a while now, the problem was recent. And something else was also recent. A change in ballpoint pen models.

What a weird problem. Who would have guessed?

Previously, the doctor was always using the same model of pen, the one that you get when ordering from our Supply Ordering System. But a few days ago, he started using a different model, because he got the pen as some kind of freeby from somewhere.

We tried a print with the old model of pen, and voila it worked. It turns out, the ink of the new model is more susceptible to the heat inside the printer, and being literally wiped from the paper because of it.

Hopefully, the doctor will be willing to do this.

The old pens used more heat-resistant ink, and therefore never encountered that problem.

We advised them to switch back to using the standard provided pens, or just signing the prescriptions afterwards, like all other doctors in the hospital do.

One of the ‘fun’ things about working in IT is figuring out problems with the most unlikely solutions. Nobody would have guessed that this was the issue, but fortunately, they got to the bottom of it.

Read on to see what the people in the comments say about this odd story.

This is what I was thinking as well.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t even legal.

The doctor seems shady.

Genuine problems are rare, but they do happen.

I didn’t know they made these, though.

Sometimes there really is a problem beyond just user error. Of course, that is pretty rare, but this was certainly one of those cases.

I bet this technician will never forget this issue, and will check the ink first if it ever comes up again. In my opinion, these types of issues are the fun ones, though.