Printing

15 years ago at work, we were still running things primarily on a single mainframe, and had a giant Xerox printer that printed all kinds of reports, student hire/fire/raise sheets, paychecks, and all kinds of other things. We also had a microfiche copier, you would have to sit there for hours on end making 50 copies of 50 sheets, silly stuff like that.

The student hire/fire/raise sheets were interesting, because you would print on yellow, blue or green paper, depending on what action was being taken. (I can't remember which color was hire, which was fire, and which was a pay raise. I am sure I have it written down in a notebook on the shelf in my office.) After the stuff for student employment was printed, you had to cut them down into 4x6 sheets. This made for a lot of 7x8.5 sized pieces of paper when you were done, these were just recycled. I was stocked for years with squares of yellow, green, and blue paper. I used to use it for all my Math homework back in the days.

The checks were interesting to do. Someone from the Treasurers office came over, would watch while you pulled the checks out of a locked cage, he also had a disk with the signature on it. Then you would print for a very long time. For a while, we also had to stuff the checks into envelopes, our stuffing machine always managed to mangle a few checks every time. I was glad to see the University go to direct deposit whenever possible, and the payroll office printed the checks on their own.

The other thing we printed was reports. All kinds of reports. We had a bunch of cubbies the reports would go into. Karl had about 4 or 5 of them, and would never take his reports. Some reports ended up getting stuffed into peper boxes and would be several boxes worth of printed paper. When I worked at night, I actually liked printing these reports, because I could fill the printer with 2000 sheets of paper, start printing, get up on top of the printer, which was warm, and take a little half nap, and only have to move when the printer stopped because the tray was full or the thing ran out of paper.

The printer sometimes would jam, you would have to take the thing nearly completely apart to get to the jam sometimes. I spent plenty of time half buried in the thing trying to get papers out of it. The printer also used toner, which came in little quart sized containers, you had a little hose like thing that you hooked the container to, and shook the toner out into the printer. One time I didn't get the thing sealed right, and the thing came apart while I was shaking. Toner went everywhere. The blue carpet was completely black, except for 2 blue shoe prints. My sneakers were black. My blue jeans were completely black. I feel sorry for whoever used the washing machine after me, I think I did the load twice to try to get the toner out.

In the morning, there were all kind of reports to deliver all over campus. This was nice to do, except in the Winter. I would get to the offices where the really big reports went, and you would see the last 2 sets of printouts sitting there on a desk, stacked four feet high. I wondered if anyone really read those things at all.

When we moved from the mainframe to HPUX servers, much of the printing was farmed out to the departments that had HP printers. We would send the print job from our servers to them, and we wouldn't give them another thought.

For a while, we were printing to the IP address for these remote printers. I eventually got tired of having them give one of these printers a new IP address, and having to have to go change 30 servers so they would all print. I started making them put these printers in DNS so I could point the print queues to the DNS names. About 5 years ago, someone somewhere in our department had a great idea, they would have all printers on campus renamed to indicate the model and location of the printer. This meant I would need to change upwards of 50 printer queues on about 50 machines. (We were up to 60 HPUX machines at one point.) It took about two weeks of users screaming at us about printing to figure out what was going on, and it was like pulling teeth to get them to tell us in advance that the printer DNS name was changing.

About 3 years ago, I finally got smart. I set up one server as a print gateway, and pointed all other servers at this gateway server. If they ended up moving the printer, or getting a new one, they would change the DNS name, and this way, I only had to make the change in one place.

It didn't change the problem that they would never tell us before hand a printer was changing, they would just change the printer, and it would suddenly be an emergency that the print queue be fixed. For the last three years, any time a print queue modification was needed, I would go on a tirade asking why we were still printing directly. I don't see why most of this isn't a web service yet, letting the end user pick a printer configured on their local machine, but we are not fully there yet. I think we are slowly getting there.

On the second day of school, I got an email that a printer had been replaced, and they needed the print queue fixed, or no one on campus would get their W-2s. I love the requests that have some sort of thinly veiled threat attached to them. As if that would get it done sooner. I had red salmon from a pouch that day for lunch, it wasn't all that good, and I refused to make the change. I had planned to wait it out for a while, just to see what happens, until my boss told me to just do it and stop whining. After I made the change, I tried to get them to test and let me know, they never got back to me. The W-2s came yesterday in campus mail, so I am assuming the printer queue is working...

Last week, I discovered that my laptop would not let me add a new printer. I fiddled with it for a while, updated CUPS, and fiddled some more until I got it working. This past Tuesday, I discovered that I couldn't print anything at all. I really haven't had time to fiddle with it a lot, I did get it to print some stuff on Wednesday, but I haven't done anything else to make sure it works.

Long story short - I am not really a fan of printing, at least not at work. It's not because if all the trees cut down for the paper, now you know the real reason.