Good Thing I Checked

[kevin_standlee]

This evening, I set the printer (which is located a fair distance away) to printing 500 copies of the Costume-Con site selection ballot, figuring that should be more than enough to handle anyone who would want to vote this year. A little while later, I went down to the printer room and could hear it continuing to crank out copies. I looked in the output tray and thought it looked like it had printed more than 500 already. I went and checked: I'd typed too many zeroes and the printer was merrily on its way toward printing 5,000 copies of the ballot, or roughly eight times the pre-registered attendance of the convention. I trotted back down to the printer room and killed the print job. Fortunately, I don't think I overprinted too badly.

Comments

[stephen-dedman.livejournal.com]

It could be worse. At the shop, we have a combination printer, photocopier, scanner and fax. I was sending a fax one time, not realising it was still set to photocopier, and it took the 8 digit phone number as the number of copies.

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

The other day I faxed my trip sheet to our other warehouse. There is balance in the universe.

[bovil.livejournal.com]

CC voting is even lighter than Worldcon voting. I wouldn't be surprised if you get less than 100 ballots cast, particularly with an unopposed run from the other side of the continent.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

That's roughly what I was thinking, too, but I usually over-prepare because it's easier to throw away unused ballots than scramble to print more. That ballot box we got is overkill, too, but Westercon and Worldcon thank CC26 for its generosity!

Save a Twee

[garyomaha.livejournal.com]

Am I the first to mention the irony of this being Earth Day...?

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

Take the extras, make paper chains out of them, and go as the Ghost of Site Selection Bids Past.

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

Just to let you know, we got 51 ballots cast. But then again, it was a smaller CC.

[paradoox.livejournal.com]

The way I usually mess this up is to think I've queued N (=100-500) copies of something to the slow color printer (1 ppm +/-) and go in and check on it in 10-15 minutes only to find out that I've accidentally picked the faster b&w printer and it is done printing N useless B&W things instead.

The haunted printer...

[nojay.livejournal.com]

One job I was handed when I was working in a small office was to fix the haunted printer that kept on trying to print extra copies of a big report (hundreds of pages each). The user had cancelled the job and even power-cycled the printer all to no avail. As soon as it was powered up again it would start printing more copies... They even tried disconnecting the computer's printer cable, no luck.

After tracing the wiring I discovered a small "intelligent" buffer/switch box plumbed in between the computer and the printer (this was before ubiquitious networking and printer servers). The user had requested 22 copies of the report. What I think happened was their fingers slipped and they ended up typing in 222 or worse. The intelligent buffer stored the requests and fed them to the printer, even after the job was deleted from the PC's print spool. Powering down the printer did no good, of course -- once it came up again the buffer started feeding it more pages.

Resetting the buffer box made the problem go away, but for a while I was considering performing an exorcism and wondering where I could lay my hands on a chicken at short notice.