PC Load Letter and Why I Hate Printers

Note: I wrote this while angry at a printer – actually all printers - and it shows. I don’t know if it’s valuable or developmental at all, but I feel better for having written it. So, let’s get angry together, shall we?

Look at this thing. It’s a beauty, isn’t it?
I mean, besides the color, shape, condition, and odor, it’s a classic.

At the risk of dating myself, I got my driver’s license in the late 1990s.  Because I lived in a very rural area, pretty much everyone got a car (of substantially varying quality) almost immediately after getting their license. I was no exception and was the beneficiary of my mother’s 1989 Toyota Camry. Granted, this was really a pass-through gift from my grandparents who purchased a new 1997 Camry and passed their 1991 Camry down to my mom. We apparently purchase a lot of Toyota Camrys.

The particular 1989 Camry I received had some great options including power windows, door locks, automated shoulder belts, and an electronic ignition lock that meant you needed not one, but two keys to start it. It was like launching an intercontinental missile every time, except you didn’t need two people to turn the keys – you could do both by yourself. Better yet, it was adorned in mahogany pearl metallic; a loathsome brown color that was sure to impress my high school friends less than you’d think.

Trying to compensate for the substantial lack of cool-factor the car had, I quickly worked to replace the stock AM/FM radio that was in the car with an Alpine CD player. Car CD players weren’t amazing back then and this one was no exception. It worked most of the time, but on a bumpy road it  would skip (and let’s not kid ourselves, this car didn’t have the best suspension in the world). The Alpine didn’t have any features beyond playing CDs. Still, it was enough for me to listen to something other than whatever was on the radio, and I was thankful for it.

Flash forward to 2022, and even the cheapest cars today come with a whole host of infotainment systems including Bluetooth connectivity, Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, and navigation. Heck, my current car is 16 years old (it is also a Camry, by the way) and it has a 4-disc CD changer that can play MP3s and has a navigation screen. And no one even considers that a CD (if you even have one) would skip in your car, because mobile electronics have gotten so much better than they were twenty-five years ago that such an issue is all but foreign to us now.

Such is the case with almost everything we touch in our daily lives, isn’t it? Take TVs as another example. I remember when our family got our first big-screen TV - a 36” tube television set encased in a wooden cabinet. It weighed about as much as a refrigerator and was as standard-definition as you could get. We had to have the repair folks out once or twice because it needed adjustment to keep the picture stable and clear. When’s the last time you even heard of a TV needing repair? This is the inexorable journey of virtually all technology – it gets more reliable and more user friendly every year. It’s why I love this industry so much.

And yet, somehow, printers still suck.

If you don’t know what this is, stop reading this and watch this, instead.

I don’t have any love for printers in any of their iterations. Let’s start with the large multifunction devices that are dotted around most offices around the world. We recently got a whole new fleet of these printer/copier/scanner/fax devices in our office, and they’re not any more reliable than the last generation we got rid of - or the one before that. Paper jams are common, print issues aren’t unheard of, and the user interface on the little LCD screen on the front was designed by someone who truly hates people who need to do anything other than make a copy – and almost no one in my office makes copies anymore. These ultra-expensive monstrosities are temperamental, of poor reliability, and virtually always cause headaches when someone wants to do something other than print a document on standard letter paper. Even better, they are almost always a lease from some “business services” firm, which is really just a way to keep you at arm’s length from the manufacturer so that they don’t need to listen to your feedback.

Then there’s the mid-level, networked printers that have been around in your business for fifteen years. They do their job mostly okay, but you’ve set them all to static IP addresses because you didn’t want to create a DHCP reservation for them back in 2005. Joke’s on you, buddy. Now when you change your addressing scheme in the office, you have to visit every single one of them – and history says you’ll probably set them to a new static IP because recording the MAC address would take longer, which means you’ll get to do this whole thing again next time. These rapidly yellowing beige boxes are getting older and often jam – especially if you’ve been so foolhardy as to put colored or thicker paper into the feeding tray. However, because they are inextricably linked to a business process like printing checks for the vending machine provider or something, you can never get rid of them. Pro tip: I suggest you order an extra fuser assembly right now before they’re unavailable on Amazon or eBay forever. I know companies that have a whole extra printer sitting in a box, “just in case.” After all, the Doritos must keep flowing, am I right?

Pictured: a guy who struggles to afford ink jet printer ink, shown here with his personal intercontinental jet.

Of course, at the bottom of the pile we have the consumer print devices that people have snuck into your company  because no way would you buy these with company money, right? Too bad, because I guarantee you that your company may not have bought the printer but you’ve paid for it many times over in inkjet ink. Fun fact: ink jet ink can cost over $22,000 per gallon (based on a three ml HP 564 cyan cartridge retailing for $17.99 at Staples.) The good news is that these devices are not tracked in any way, and the petty cash reimbursements or expense reports for ink rarely trigger an intervention by management. And they’re so convenient to have in people’s offices – after all, we’d hate to have them get up to get that document off the printer, it’s a whole twenty-five feet away! The best part is that when they break or have a weird line in the printout because of a clogged nozzle, they’re going to call IT – because spending three hours of a technician’s time at whatever their rate is more cost effective than replacing the $50 printer, right?

In the specialty category is the plotter: the favorite of your drafting and engineering groups. They don’t want it connected to any major print management software though, because then you’d know how many “Happy Birthday” banners they’re printing versus how many detailed floor plans they’re drafting up. Hint: there are a lot of birthdays in that department. On the plus side, the ink for these is often even more expensive and the paper they take costs as much as a hand-knotted rug. Don’t worry, though – they always have a support contract on these with an outside firm that expired last year. But that’s okay, because you’re an IT tech so you can fix it... right?

Printing is a consistent hot potato on my team. No one wants to deal with the printers because it’s viewed as a losing battle. It almost always rests with the newest person on the team, because they eagerly accept new responsibilities and haven’t found someone else to toss the potato to yet. We use the term “printers” pejoratively when referring to a project that we think is going to be a dud, saying things like “that’s just like printers – is there a better way?”

This might be as good as the state of the technology ever got. Sometimes I miss the sweet, sweet sound of a dot matrix printer beating the ribbon mercilessly against the paper.

And that’s the problem: I honestly don’t know of a better way than printers for the very specific use case of creating hard copies of a document. I haven’t found a substitute that works for that specific niche - which admittedly is getting less and less necessary in daily business operations but still happens some untold number of times per day. Ultimately, I’m a believer in market economics; and since we keep buying these things, there’s very little incentive for print device manufacturers to ever get better. It’s like car dealers – we all complain about them, but since you (and I) keep going there to buy they have no economic incentive to change.

While I often wax optimistic about the future of technology and how we just keep getting better and better tools at our disposal, I don’t necessarily share that optimism for printing. I have every expectation that this blog post will be as valid in 2032 as it is in 2022 – because it was valid in 2012 and 2002. Printers sucked before the GUI and continue to suck in the “post-PC” era.

I suppose that consistency is somewhat comforting. Some things never do change – even if they really, really should.

Questions for reflection:

• What piece of technology do you find should be much better than it is?

• Is there any kind of substitute that exists for it? Why aren’t you using it?

• Is there anything you can do to either remove the dependency on or replace this tech?