Sometimes you just have to go without the thanks

When I started working as a student employee on campus, we used to print all the administrative reports in the computer room on a giant Xerox printer, and delivered reams and reams of stuff all over campus in the morning. We also did lots of microfilming of reports.

As we started replacing our mainframe with HPUX machines, I kept suggesting that we start printing directly to these office's printers directly. (I got tired of delivering boxes of reports, and seeing the last batch I brought over unopened.) We eventually got everyone to switch to printing directly. This was good for the end users too, they would get the print outs right away.

For the past couple of years, I have been trying to get us out of the "printing from Unix" business altogether. At this point, I don't see why people are submitting ad hoc print jobs to print from the machines. Most of the applications are web apps, I don't see why they don't just print locally from their browser. It should be easy to switch the application, but people are slow to change when there isn't some "we're getting rid of the Mainframe, this is how things are going to be" edict for us to give.

3 years ago, I made all the printers we print to print via DNS names. I got tired of IP addresses changing, and them wanting me to change the print queues on tons of machines. Last year, I created a Unix print gateway, all our machines send their jobs to the print gateway, and if a printer needs to be changed, I only have to do it in one place.

Last Friday, the purchasing office moved their office. In the move, they got a new printer. Their CSR decided the printer needed a new IP address and DNS name. The old printer disappeared. On Monday I didn't show up to work. (I didn't even get out of bed until 11am.) It turns out the purchasing office discovered they couldn't print purchase orders sometime on Monday. They opened an issue, but didn't get the information where it needed to go. On Tuesday, they made a federal case out of it. One of the guys in our office showed then how to print locally, without having the print from the servers themselves, but not before someone convinced the Operations staff to try to 'fix' the print queue by modifying it. Unfortunately, the CSR that talked them into making the changes was going on his knowledge of Linux, and didn't know anything about HPUX printing. They didn't fix the problem, they just messed things up worse.

Last night, my director very politely asked me when I would get a chance to fix the print queue. I told him I would get around to it sometime today. (He was ok with this answer.) This morning when I looked at it, the old queue had about 40 print jobs, which the purchasing department still wanted printed, but I couldn't use the existing queue, which had been damaged. The old queue also used the old driver, the new printer wasn't compatible. I was able to create a new queue, and preserve the print jobs. It wasn't all that hard to do. We didn't really get a thank you or anything.

Later in the day, and thank you came in from a couple of people, it was directed at someone else, it was forwarded by the guy who got it. I don't need the thanks, really, but I could do without the federal case about a printing problem. The least they could do is drop off some donuts. I can't have donuts, but at least everyone else in the place would be able to...