2006 has started off with a momentous achievement for me - I single-handedly opened up a printer and got rid of a paper jam! It is one huge brute of a printer, with multiple trays for paper, flashy LED’s, an LCD screen that displays fancy messages and online help, and more buttons than one cares for.

Being an Engineer I am ashamed to admit it, but it is true: I am petrified of printers. This irrational phobia is beyond doubt attributable to the fact that in my childhood I never played around with these things. I have had a PC at home since 10th grade, but never a printer. My first prolonged exposure to these ink spewing beasts was in the first year of engineering. And therein lies the root cause of all the trouble.

The printers we had in our college were all Dot Matrix printers – flotsam from another era, blasts from the past. Lightening has greater likelihood of striking twice in the same place than getting a Dot Matrix printer to work at first shot. There are just too many things you need to figure out. The most frustrating part was inserting the paper. Whenever I tried to put in a paper into a dot matrix printer, it would invariably catch hold of it, tug at it, swallow it, and spew it out the other side. It would never stop with the printing head at the top of the page; for some reason, the paper would do a complete revolution of the cylinder and come out. Then I learnt the trick of manually inserting and adjusting the paper, and not letting the machine eat it up. Things became a bit better after that. The other contentious issue was that of the “Online” switch. I have no idea why it existed. But it would always end up in the wrong position. Of course one was never aware of that, and give the print command three to four times. By the time you got the printer “online”, figured out what had happened, and frantically tried to cancel the duplicate jobs, at least two copies would get printed.

Another thing that never helped one’s cause was that printing would always be done in marathon end-of-the-term sessions, where the entire term’s work would be printed out in a day, for the entire batch of fifteen to twenty people. I can vividly remember images of the “printer experts” entangled in reams of dot-matrix printer paper, staring out hopelessly into space, while their friends fired away print commands for tens of copies of twenty-page documents.

Dot Matrix printers were endured for four years. Thankfully, I need use them no more. Strangely enough, I miss them a lot. Especially the screeching sound they make when they print. After four years of cajoling and coaxing the printers (and the more than occasional banging), you can almost make out a language from the screeches: you can tell the health of the printer, how well-oiled it is, and how much life is left in the ribbon.

In Infy, most printers are huge industrial grade printers that churn out prints at more than 50 pages per minute. These are dream machines, except for the paper jams. When a jam occurs, the printer happily informs you about it. It also suggests methods to solve the problem. Open this door. Push that green lever. Lower this panel. Pull out any paper stuck inside. I always ignored these – until today that is. I made up my mind to end this mental slavery, and followed the instructions. What do you know, it worked. Out came wonderful copies of the document I had given a print command on a few minutes ago. Another great concept is the network printer. Most printers here are network printers, so if the one on your floor has indigestion from a paper jam, you can just send your job to the printer on the floor below. Brilliant.

If only the manufacturers would think of better names. HP LaserJet 9000 PCL 6 – why are there so many numbers in a name? How would you like to be called Tom 200 XL 7? Or call your pet dog Poodlejet 2000 LL 9? Of course there is the other end of the spectrum. In Infy, network printers have been given the most creative names – Ganga, Godavari, Kaveri, Saraswati. Then we have the Everest, K2, Anamudi, Nanadhadevi, Dhaulagiri, Annapurna series of printers. Believe it or not, I even found a printer called “Nathan’s Sexy Beast (HP Laserjet 2100)” with “Don’t use it” as the comment. Interesting, to say the least.

That is all I have to say on the subject of printers. Now wish me luck while I go to print the weekly report.
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Darn! Out of paper.