I am not making this up

One of the assigned responsibilities of our “tier one,” as she is called, is maintaining printer supplies and such. I walk up to the printer to print off one page, and she’s just staring blankly at the printer. She looks at me and asks, “did you print something?”

“Not yet,” I reply. “My job’s in queue.”

“Well, it’s not working for some reason,” she says. I look at the screen on the printer and >TONER EMPTY: REPLACE CARTRIDGE< is blinking. So I point out that there’s no toner in the printer. “I see that,” she says as she rolls her eyes, “I didn’t expect that that would stop it from printing!”

“Yep,” I say. “It can’t print without any ink.”

“Well, the toner cartridges are right over there,” she points, and walks away. I’m wearing all white today, but I need that printout, so I grab the toner and carefully replace it (we have one of those old printers that blow out a plume of toner whenever it’s replaced). I close up the printer and print the queue.

My supervisor walks up and looks at the printer. “Oh,” she says, “did someone get this working again?”

I shrug, “we just needed to replace the toner, so I swapped it out.”

She laughs. “Yeah, I saw that it said replace cartridge. I asked J.J. to do it, but he didn’t know how, and I don’t know how. I figure there had to be instructions somewhere.”

I look at her, trying not to make any sort of judgmental face. “You just swap it out from the toner tray.

She rolls her eyes, “well, I know that. I know that the toner goes in this tray right here—” she says as she opens it while it’s printing, causing a loud XKKRYNGH sound as seven sheets of paper get jammed up inside. “Whoops,” she says. “I’ll go get J.J. and see if he knows how to fix it.”

Side note: J.J. is our accountant. He is not our tier one.

I volunteer to un-jam the printer, and I calmly open it out and start weeding out all the jammed paper. At this point, the tier one comes back in and sees me pulling things out of the printer. She’s visibly upset. “I already called the service guy,” she says, “exactly so this doesn’t happen. You shouldn’t be trying to swap out the toner yourself.”

“The toner wasn’t the problem,” I say. “We just got a paper jam. It’s easy to fix.” I pull out the last piece of paper, close up the printer, and re-send the queue. I grab the one page of paper that I need, while the other 50 print back out, and I leave.

I pass J.J. on my way out of the printer room. I hear him talking to my supervisor behind me. “Oh,” he says, “did you get the toner cartridge replaced?”

“Yeah, Robert did it,” the supervisor replied. “I guess you just have to put it on this tray here—” XKKRYNGH!!!

So now the printer’s “out of order.” I’ll pull out the paper next time I need to print something. Which will probably be Wednesday.

On the other hand, we do have two printers…