As much as everyone loves to hate printers, the fact that a printer can grab a single sheet of paper off a huge stack even semi-reliably is more impressive to me than 14nm photolithography.
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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True, but does it need to make mysterious clunking noises for three minutes before it starts?
That's the incantations in printer language that allow the black ~~magic~~ ink to flow
As a printer repair tech, I hate how I can recognize happy printer clunks from sad ones. It is not clinking as an offering, but the noises of a skittish animal domesticated far too quickly
Rousing its machine spirit
Praise the Omnisiah
My mom ran the mimeograf room in a large high school in Brooklyn. It was so awesome going to work with her and seeing the machines.
Similarly, optical drives have ever worked. what a miracle.
Printers exist to spite you. They are chaotic machines.
I thought it was just me. Finding out as I progress in IT, no. They're all cunts.
And if the printers are listening you're not a cunt. (Please keep working)
Edit: they fucking heard. The admin sharp gave me so much trouble today. Work on one machine not on another. Generic error. Adding via IP or wifi or wired. Im sorry printers I didn't mean it. Y r u this way
Edit 2: it was the port
When I started in Desktop Support my super power was equipment suddenly working when I showed up. I used to joke that it was because they were afraid of me, and even printers stopped acting up eventually.
I like to think that they could sense that I wouldn't hesitate to go all Office Space on them.
A hypothesis on this phenomenon I've seen before is that the person with the problem doesn't want to seem stupid when you are physically present. So they are more careful, read dialog boxes, actually do the power cycle, etc.
The first printer that made me audibly yell "what the fuck" was a Konica Minolta. Not because it was actually malfunctioning, but because of the absolute clusterfuck that is the settings page on its web-server.
They very clearly want you to pay them for either management software or maintenance.
As someone who used to earn money from cleaning and repairing printers... I can say this is highly accurate.
Yeah I work for a commercial print shop and I would rate our printers on a scale of "Useless piece of expensive shit" and "can we please just get through until my lunch break when I'm not so hungover?"
Black and white laser printers connected to a network cable have given me the least amount of pain.
Color inkjet connected via WiFi? Just the thought angers me.
Just saved a few printers from the recycling pile. One was a brother Ethernet connected BW laser, with auto duplexing. Currently set up at home, replacing my hp WiFi BW laser with manual duplexing.
I am pleased.
I bought a brother color laser printer for 20€ used once. It came with almost full (clone) toner cartridges and already had 73k pages on its print counter.
Today it has over 80k pages on its print counter and the toner that came with it is still not empty.
I occasionally need to open it to remove a stuck piece of paper, and the print quality is not the greatest because it desperately needs a replacement drum, but I'll keep running it until I am no longer able to repair it
I bought a Brother B/W laser printer with a USB-A connector about a decade ago. It ran through just over a full box (2500 sheets) of A4 paper on it's preinstalled demo-toner before I needed to insert the full toner that came with it. The most work I ever had to do on it was when I tried to print on slightly-too-thick paper and it decided that it would rather make confetti instead. Spent an hour pulling out individual fibers of paper, and it never acted up again.
printers are the only machine that understands malice
Crazy that there are still millennials out there who won't simply refuse to use a printer and email the word doc over instead!
I had a job where all I did is babysit one Zebra label printer.
The most frustrating job of my life. First world problems
I ❤️ copiers.
My HP laser printer is around 14-16 years old, runs flawless.
For some reason, printers have always worked fine if I'm copying something from something like a built in scanner (ink weirdness aside).