Once upon a time (why it was only earlier this year) we had a speedy, high-quality, colour, laser printer which did us just fine; I mean yes it had its occasional technological tantrums, but it faired us well over the years and even survived the office move from the fifth floor of City Campus all the way up yonder Headingley Campus to our current location in the Grange. However, it took just one fateful day…and a suspect ‘water meets printer’ episode courtesy of Duncan Worth…to finish it off forever. We tried in vain to fix it, pressing all its buttons and even attempting the age-old trick of ‘turning it off and turning it on again’, but to no avail. Sadly we had to call it a day and waved goodbye to our beloved printer as it was wheeled away by members of the Computing Services team.
It wasn’t long before our colleagues from CS were back, only this time they came to deposit a gift – a replacement model to our former printer. It wasn’t quite the same, it didn’t look as advanced but in its favour it was a little less cumbersome. Of course, like many things, it didn’t work straight away; in fact it seemed to take weeks before it was ready to spawn our documents. In the meantime we were hooked up to another one of our ex-printers, situated in a neighbouring office and now belonging to our Corporate Projects team mates, which was great apart from when the team left for the day and locked their door (not to purposely halt our use of their machine I hasten to add).
Once our own new addition to the team was ready to roll we set our digits to Control>P and awaited with anticipation the results of our printed work. As the first sheet churned out there were gasps of horror as our once crisp and clean documents came out streaked with yellow ink. We hoped it might just be a teething problem and the streaks would eventually fade, but things went from bad to worse as the weeks went on and our words became almost illegible. Drastic action was needed and after numerous complaints from our leader Helen, the CS team returned with a third printer.
Once again there was a delay between sending to print and actually receiving the work at the other end…about three weeks on this occasion! By the time the printer was ready to install I had travelled over 2000 miles to my holiday in Egypt and back, so I hadn’t missed anything revolutionary print wise then!
I have now been back just over a week and in that short space of time have seen printer no.3 fail to install, install, fail to print, print perfectly, shred documents, Computing colleagues come and go and finally the installation of printer no.4! But despite a few minor install/print issues earlier today we are now once again up and running and able to publish many thanks to Spencer and co from Computing Services for their efforts and their saintly patience!
Beth Hallam, News & Media
