January 10, 2007
Printer Reset
It's a cheap little Genicom LA36W. Trouble Ticket says "part is loose." Actual trouble was that the pull tractor had been removed and flipped upside down and they couldn't figure out how to put it back (not realizing it was upside down.) Somewhere along the line, the box of fan-fold paper disappeared, and the printer powered off, which made it stop responding to the server which then gave up on it and shut it's queue down.
I find the printer, put the pull tractor back on, load the paper, do a test print. It's fine. Set up my company laptop to print directly to the printer port, do a test print, print out my trouble ticket with phone numbers. No problem. Wheel in a chair. Move my terminal room phone from jack 210 (my desk) to jack 160 (near the printer.) Speakerphones are good -- they save having to hold the handset for hours while waiting for human interaction.
I call the helpdesk line, to be greeted by the robots. Put in my user ID, listen to the message that says "if you don't need a real person, go to the website." Excuse me, if I wanted the website I would have gone to the website. The ticket says option 5. 5 is not an option, so I sit through the blather, hit 4. More blather, hit 2. "Your call is important! Go sit in a corner for an unknown number of minutes while we work with those who called before you did." Sit long enough to get out the camera and take a picture of me listening to the "on-hold" music. Get a live person.... "I need a printer reset." "Your call back number? OK, your ticket number for the callback is nnnnnnnn, have a nice wait!"
So here I am, on hold, snoozing, stuck. Can't go anywhere or do anything else 'cause if I'm not here ready to go when they call back they hang up and I have to go through the whole rigamarole again. Since I can't do anything constructive, I'll make a blog entry.....
All I need is for someone to open up the print queue. About a 15 second job. To do this I have to sit here for hours. Me and the hundreds of others who are trying to get their services fixed. But the support desk cannot allow it's techs to sit around idle, waiting for trouble calls to be fixed immediately. No. They need to put people on hold so they are never idle. That is the best bang for their buck. It cost the company far more in lost time elsewhere -- but that time is spread out and is on other peoples' budgets so it doesn't count. As the old saying goes, "Penny Wise, Pound Foolish!"
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Update:
*SIGH* The printer had been idle for so long that they took it out of the system. The VPSW number is now in Pasadena, the SORD IDs don't exist, and the IP address no longer has an entry in the DNS. The printer may be physically there and working, but according to the system it is not. And, as anyone who has dealt with the system knows, the system overrules reality.