I’ve always said I am not immune from receiving this award, and I gave it to myself today, for a deserving act. I wanted to print out some spreadsheets, to have a hard copy of the data I’ve collected over the past few years, and the various manipulations I’ve done with that data.

The printer is located in the same room as the computer, and as soon as I saw it, I could see all was not well with the printer. The display, insteading of indicating it was ready, had a bright red flashing light, and informing me of a “40 MIO ERROR”. I was immediately disappointed since I did want to do some printing, and it looked like there would be problems. After all, what the hell is a “40 MIO ERROR”?

I hunted around in the room, and turned up a printer manual. Specifically, the smaller manual that has nice bright pictures of how to set up the printer when you take it out of the box, but not what to do when there is a problem. That information is located in the other printer manual, happily pointed out by the manual in my hands. 10 minutes of searching failed to unearth the second printer manual, so I sat down and wondered what to do.

I pushed all the buttons on the printer, even opening and closing the paper tray, to see if there might be a temporary glitch that sorted itself out through a non-related action to fix it. Alas, this was not the case, and 15 minutes after walking into the room to use the computer, I was still being mocked by the unknown “40 MIO ERROR” message. I decided at that point that the only option available to me was to connect to the net, surf over to the Hewlett-Packard site and hope they had online technical support.

I did this, and found that there is indeed a wealth of technical support at the site, just not for “40 MIO ERRORS”. I was getting desperate. I followed a link to see what the troubleshooting technique for a “79 ERROR” was, simply because it was an error with a number as well. I did what it suggested, but it did not solve my problem. Drat. So it would appear that the people at Hewlett-Packard did have a possible 79 errors, at least, that might occur with this printer.

I decided to give up. It did not look like I was going to be doing any printing. 40 minutes after I’d stepped in the room, I was no closer to the first page being printed than I was when I initially entered. I was putting the little manual back on the shelf, in preparating for leaving the room and going to take care of some other matters, and the back page fell open to reveal the section that had told me the troubleshooting section was in the other manual. Part of that was a line of text I’d overlooked originally, and I read it now with more interest, basically because I was accepting defeat. “Turn printer off and on again” was the instruction, and I figured there was nothing to lose by doing so.

Yes, you guessed it. After being turned off and on again, the printer quietly purred through the warm-up mode, and cheerily announced it was “READY” to print. Why exactly the simple act of turning it off and on again had not occurred to me, I can not say. I really don’t know.

However, after spending about three-quarters of an hour trying to find a solution to the “40 MIO ERROR” when I just had to flick the on/off switch a couple of times, I felt pretty idiotic. Thus, for my technical inadequacies, I awarded myself the SPOTD award.

Categories: SPOTD