Source: Pexels/Reddit

Very rare is a person who has a stable relationship with their printer. Especially when it comes to office-sanctioned high volume ones.

How would you handle a printer that simply couldn’t be fixed no matter what you tried? One guy recently shared a bizarre story about his own experience with this on Reddit. Here’s what happened.

At least someone was honest at the end

This one starts with printers.

I worked as the tech support guy in a company where it was some kind of a status symbol to have their own printer as opposed to using the big shared printer.

My attempts at making that sane fell into deaf ears.

Executives get awfully particular about their printers.

The weapon of choice was a very entry level black and white laser from a huge tech company.

Eventually that model was deprecated and new one, that looked almost the same was released.

We bought five and replaced some beaten up ones.

Seems like a sensible investment.

These printers almost immediately came up with a problem: at random they’d print the print 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, the same with the PCL driver that was often the savior in various forum posts, but nothing helped.

I spent the next day with the tech support.

Drivers are the bane of any office worker’s existence.

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.

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’ll upgrade the firmware.

Hopefully that’s an easy fix.

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.

There’s always a newer version available…

On my next call to their support they finally agreed to send someone to look at the printers.

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 screw driver and pops the thing open.

Oh! Well now that’s unexpected.

He then replaces the whole motherboard and does it to all five.

I had to ask what was that about.

The guy helpfully tells me that yeah, you can’t upgrade the firmware of these things, it was a security upgrade and it completely prevents the firmware tool from working.

You’d think that would be more clearly communicated from the vendor at the start…

He also knew very well of the issue that specific firmware was having.

Somehow this left me loving printers even more.

The inner machinations of printers still remain an enigma to so many. Let’s see what the Reddit comments had to chime in with here.

All of the commenters could agree upon one thing:

Some tried to shoot their own shot.

One person could relate all too well.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who ends up quitting over a dispute over bereavement leave.

Another made a very strong point.

And someone else took the chance to vent.

There’s no “undo” button on all the damage these things have caused over the years…