Re: you turn it OFF and THEN you turn it ON......got it?
Sometimes you just turn it on.
So the customer is in a frenzy because they want the printer to print, and it doesn't print. Is the green light on? We are assured the green light is on. Are any other lights blinking? Is there enough paper. No, yes, yes & yes.
Pretty much this exact scenario happened to me when working for an ILR station. News stories would come over a satellite link as a serial stream straight (well, almost) to a dot-matrix printer that used fanfold and was about as robust as a typical tank.
Unfortunately, being somewhat junior, there was no call-out fee, no reports to file, no comeback on the numpty who couldn't see the power light was "off", let alone that the thing wasn't "on line". As it was a Saturday, I was bleeped out of bed at some unearthly hour (5am?), spent 10 minutes on the phone explaining which lights to look out for and which buttons to press "yes, that's ok, yes, I've pressed that" and then 30 minutes driving into town, one minute to walk from the back door up to the newsroom and a total of, oh, I dunno, five seconds (about as long as it took to walk across the room) to spot the missing lights and turn the blasted thing back on whereupon page after page of overnight news and sport started spewing all over the newsroom floor.
Certainly beat that time when the flat roof was being replaced and the company doing it had just finished scraping the old stuff off when it started raining, so they decided to go home.
M.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
