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The Dreams of Printers (thelemmy.club)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/curatedtumblr@sh.itjust.works
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waterandsilver: crazy how the printer is the only piece of tech that acts up like that almost every day of its life. and we just accept it. water and silver: i don't think i've ever met a printer that actually wanted to be a printer. i think most printers have dreams of being on the stage. in-the-drowning-deep: I met a printer early in my IT career that did not want to be a printer. it sat in a school reprographics room, sullenly chewing any job it was fed - if it deigned to notice them at all. then one day, a miracle occurred. an exhausted physics teacher, instead of punching in 12 for the number of copies she wanted of the 30-page booklet she had made for her A-level physics class, punched in 1200. and that printer camt o life. this print job was its moment, its magnum opus! it WOULD NOT be parted from it, no matter what we did, until we physically unplugged it from the wall, by which time it had printed almost 200 copies. moral of the story: no printer wants to be a printer unless you also do not want it to be a printer for a bit. netherworldpost: printers do not want to be printers because they want to be problems
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[–] 69 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (7 children)

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.

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  • [–] 36 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    True, but does it need to make mysterious clunking noises for three minutes before it starts?

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  • [–] 36 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    That's the incantations in printer language that allow the black magic ink to flow

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  • [–] 29 points 8 months ago

    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

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