I'm a guy who thinks he "knows where he is in life". Mid-thirties, settled, career on track... you know the type. I pride myself on many things. I consider myself intelligent, reasonably well-educated, and good with technical subjects.

Because of my job as a network system administrator, one of my biggest pet peeves is users who call in and complain about something that's really their fault. You know, the coffee-cup-in-the-CD-ROM-tray types. The ones who don't remove disk two before inserting disk three. I even write songs making fun of them.

Today, I met the enemy, and he is me.

It's the day after Christmas, and I'm printing out pictures. I took photos of the family at the Grandparent's house on Christmas day, and some of them came out really good, so I'm printing them with my fancy photo printer on the fancy photo paper. You know, the expensive stuff, the kind where the paper costs more than the printer.

But I'm thhhmart. Yup. I don't print on the expensive stuff right away, no. I have some midrange stuff, some glossy paper that's cheaper than the high-end stuff. I use the cheaper stuff to test the size, cropping, and gamma first. Once the picture looks right on the cheap stuff, then I do a final print on the expensive stuff. Been doing this for a long time, now, and it's always worked well.

When you change the paper in the printer, you also change the "paper" setting in the printer driver software. The printer driver tells the printer just how much ink to put on the paper, to compensate for the different amounts of "wicking" that's built into each kind of paper. And the midrange glossy paper, compared to the expensive glossy paper, has two different specific settings in the printer driver.

So I get things looking right on the cheaper paper, drop a sheet of the pricey stuff in, change the printer driver to "Photo Paper Pro", and fire away.

The resulting print is not at all what I expected. It's in "simulate an illustration" mode. You know what I mean: Everything looks like it was painted with a watercolor brush. Now, it just so happens that this printer driver has this as one of its setting options. You can select, in the printer driver, a little checkbox to simulate an illustration, and it will print this way. Note that I'm talking about the printer driver itself, not the photo-editing software. They actually have an option for this right in the driver.

But I checked the driver and the "simulate illustration" checkbox was not checked. Hmph, I'm sure there's a bug in the driver. The software is behaving as if the checkbox is checked. It must have done it when I chose the different paper setting. Something buggy about the communication between the driver and the dialog box UI. Or perhaps it's because the printer driver on the print server is a different version than the one on my local PC. Or something like that.

I mess with it a few times and manage to waste a few more sheets of the expensive stuff in the process. I'm at the end of my rope. It's time to do what we sysadmins dread the most: call for backup.

So I call up Canon tech support. The lady on the other end of the line is very friendly and helpful. She talks me through a bunch of stuff, including reinstalling the drivers, as well as unplugging the printer from the print server and instead plugging it directly into the PC to rule out driver problems on the print server.

We print several test pages on plain paper with various print settings, and I can't get it to fail now. All seems well, and I chalk up the bug to FM. (She asked what FM was, too. My explanation is always: "The M stands for Magic.")

She says, "hey, before you plug it back in to the print server, print one final page on the good paper". Sure, okay, I wanted to get a good print anyway (the whole point of this exercise), so I do.

And it comes out as a watercolor illustration.

But this time, all I did was put the better paper into the printer. I didn't even touch the driver. And it was working just mere moments ago on the cheaper paper. My first thought is that the printer somehow detects the type of paper plugged into it, but I'd already confirmed that this wasn't the case.

Then she says, "you're not putting the paper into the printer upside-down, are you?"

You can just shoot me now.

Hey..... it happens to the best of us.... I have done some pretty stupid stuff in my days to, allthough I dont seem to recollect any now. But believe me, been there.... done that! =)

I fix copiers and printers for Ricoh and I get more calls for user errors than anything. The only time it's really annoying is when the user blames the machine or gets mad at us because they can't operate the equipment.

And just to prove I'm not totally dain-bramaged, here's a picture of what it the resulting prints were like. Those of you who've seen the "watercolor" effect in an image-editing program will agree that the over-inking on the wrong side of the paper (righthand image) looks exactly like that.

At some point I guess we're all an end user. Great story Tony. There is a person alive who wont relate to this.

There is a person alive who wont relate to this.

Who is this person?

I think that was a typo.

Hey Tony...just wanted to tell you that I really like your songs. They're very clever and well done. I particularly liked "Comfortably Dumb".

So, what's "Consonance 2000"?

HAHAHAHA! Yes, I have had days like this too. Very humbling. Glad you kept your sense of humor through it - I know some folks that would have been screaming at tech support (been on the wrong end of those calls, too...).

Well, look on the bright side, all that expensive paper that you thouht was ruined with watercolors can be flipped over and used properly...

Matthew

Hey, it says a lot to come out and tell a story like that. A lot of people would put this in the "We must never speak of this again" category.

...just wanted to tell you that I really like your songs. They're very clever and well done. I particularly liked "Comfortably Dumb".

Thanks, Svferris, I'm glad you liked them. That one is a particular favorite of mine.

So, what's "Consonance 2000"?

Consonance is an annual convention in the bay area where filkers go to share/swap songs.

all that expensive paper that you thouht was ruined with watercolors can be flipped over and used properly...

Again, I'm terminally stupid. Hadn't considered that!

/me retrieves sheets from trash...

Glad you kept your sense of humor through it

More like my sense of caution and embarrassment. The humor was my post-event therapy to conceal and suppress the crippling sense of humiliation afterwards.

But yeah, having been on the wrong end of those kinds of calls is one of the reasons I try to stay as humble as possible even when I think I'm sure the problem is on their end.

Dang it, yes.
But it illustrates my point

I had trouble connecting to my ISP, (yes, woefull dialup) and called tech support. I'd uninstalled drivers done the whole shebang and went through the entire thing with the help-desk.
Then, in a moment of brilliance, I typed in my NEW PASSWORD.
I thanked the tech for his help, appologised for keeping him from the hallway cricket match, hung up and stuck my head in a bucket of water.

I see the difference, but what is that a picture of?

It looks like a creepy one-eyed clown with sharp teeth and pointy ears giving me the finger.

ROFL!! It does look like that! And it looks like it was painted beautifully!

It's a magnified section of a picture of a christmas tree. That's one of the ornaments.

What a terrible ornament to have around a child!

I'm disappointed Tony;

Sys/Net Admin's don't call tech support... It's a sign of weakness!

You didn't read the FAQ?

Tony,
Don't feel bad. I just spent an evening instalilng mobo drivers & almost flashing my ROM before realizing I had the DV camcorder connected to the WRONG WIRE.

At least I had a smaller audience.

-Zeke

OMG! This is bad!
If even the FAQ master makes these kinds of mistakes, where does that leave us mere mortals?

We're doomed I tell ya, doomed!

One of his circuits must have temporarily overloaded. Not surprising at christmas.

I had one of those moments this morning. I spent 45 min. on a user's laptop cursing Bill Gates because the stupid thing wouldn't print to the office network printer. Finally I realized that the computer that the printer was normally chained to was not even plugged in due to a weekend LAN party at the office. Bleh! I'm an idiot.

Tony... it's no where near as bad as the user that called us to come move his enterprise server, only to have us inform him that he'd have no problems moving his filing cabinet by himself.... (in his defense, it was an impressive filing cabinet, black with red drawers... but still 3 drawers and a keyhole) sad thing is he was in charge of technical contracts for a department at one of the DC/Northern Virginia area airports (nothing involving flight, but still a little scary).... So I guess what I'm saying is that no matter how stupid you feel theres always some one that fell through the cracks of human evolution.

Speaking of which, anyone else have any good stupid user stories?

Did he use the 'server' for anything?! Wasn't he confused by the way people were putting paper in theirs?

ya got me.... the server in question ended up being in a different room and was moved several months prior by his non communicative lacky... and as much as I hate to pick on peoples physical defects I've never seen anyone in a position like his openly drool... but he did... spots all over his shirt... kinda gross...

Just one of those stories that needed to be shared..

Bet he was the life of the office parties

where's my....where's my staplerr. I want my stapler.