As usual, it takes a disaster for proper rules to be implemented.

Or, said in a nicer way, one learns from one's failures.

Far better to make a mistake and learn the appropriate lessons, than to make the same mistake and never learn anything at all. Too many people I've dealt with over the years fall into the latter category.

Even without the rule in place, I would be very suspicious if someone in an office environment asked me for pliers, or other tools (soldering irons spring to mind). I would definitely want to know what they were up to before I allow their grubby little hands to touch MY tools.

But then maybe I am paranoid

Or just experienced

We had a very expensive electrical tester go missing when an intern "borrowed" it, and the bespoke/custom test leads it had been stored with got scattered all over the area he was working in. Gave him a day or so to bring it all back and it didn't reappear. I found him the following morning and had a very stern but quiet word. Think it was pretty clear I was pissed off.

I don't like having to confront people, but probably better off dealing with me than some of the others. At a previous workplace a similar transgression by an intern led to the workshop foreman chasing him across the building wielding a hammer, so he probably got off rather lightly!

Equally I'm rather impressed that someone in marketing actually knew what a pair of pliers was. Much like a software dev asking to borrow a screwdriver, that should have set off alarm bells all on its own.

First thought "who is he/she going shove said screwdriver into ?"

Depending on the conclusion I might well be quite happy to lend one of the cheap sacrificial ones from the pound shop. "Blade or Philips ?"

Although as a precaution against the rare dev that possess a (dangerously) little knowledge of hardware, I might have previously replaced the access screws on anything important with torx.

Flathead, Philips, torx... too many tools. This dev keeps it simple by packing a compact angle grinder :D

PS. Flathead sounds a little less criminally inciteful, plausible deniability "Who, Me?" style ;)

...definitely want to know what they were up to before...

And the number of times when someone has come in asking to borrow tool x but when you ask them what for and finally drag a cogent explanation out of them, it transpires that actually they need tool y but didn't know that! The logical conclusion of this is that the person wanting to borrow the tool isn't actually competent to carry out the operation they are intending to because if they were, they would have known which tool to use, all of which then means I often then have to down my own tools and go and do their job for them because it's quicker than waiting for them to come back with the now-broken item and having to do a lot of unnecessary repairs.

M.

> ... the person wanting to borrow the tool isn't actually competent to carry out the operation they are intending to because if they were, they would have known which tool to use

Indeed!

A mate of mine worked in a tool hire outfit, open to public and trade. Theoretically they hired out chainsaws, "theoretically" because in the years he worked there never once was one hired out. Member of the public, "I'd like to hire a chainsaw please." Hire guy, "What's it for?". Punter, "I need to trim a privet bush." "Here, try these sheers..."

I suppose the theory was that a pro tree surgeon might need one one day, but if they couldn't repair their own after a bit of a bork, they certainly would have access to a few more anyway.

*shears -->

Both are equally valid ..

I had a note on my desk at a previous company to say that I was willing to lend out tools, but only if the signature in my loan book was made in the borrowers blood!

I also only left one pen on my desk surface, a genuine "Bic" that had been used until all the ink had run out i.e. both parts of the pen body were translucent.

I used to work in a place where one of the other engineers regularly lost his own tools and thought it was perfectly acceptable to "borrow" someone else's and label them with his own name...

He also failed to understand the concept of "in use".

One day I was working under a bench with the tools I needed on top so I could grab them as needed - put my hand up to get the tool, but couldn't reach it. Popped my head out to see this guy wandering off it.

Another time, I was running a test which involved writing test results down in a log book every thirty seconds. After writing an entry, I lookup up at the display to get the next reading to see that the values had all dropped to zero. Looking further to see what had gone wrong, I saw him wandering off with the instrumentation that was obviously in use - 1 hour of testing ruined.

IT people as well.

Having an engineering background where tool use are the norm, so comming to IT I assumed all technical people could use at least handtools like screwdrivers, wrenches, sockets, multimeters... I learned I was wrong, and that some IT peoples hardware skills came from maybe changing the ribbon in a type writer. Personal toolbag for me from then on.

I have joked that 'tool intelligence' is missing from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences

I say devices as it's not just actual printers!

The usual one with a paper jam in the output was for them to merrily tear off the stub of paper without using the pressure release leaver, leaving me to have to half dismantle the machine to get to the remainder.

Two from a company I worked for many years ago that had a cost saving fanatic of an FD (if you've ever seen the Dilbert cartoon on trying to get a new pencil that's what she was like, you genuinely had to provide your empty biro before she'd issue a new one). The first one was putting part-used label sheets back in the laser printer, on one occasion I did manage to unpeel the label that had wrapped around the drum and clean the residue off. She also insisted on using scrap paper in the fax machine on the grounds that the back was still blank (fair enough until someone didn't check the front and used an invoice copy as packing material to send something to a customer); one user thought that as there was only a little bit of printing on a sheet she could safely Tippex* it out and put the paper straight in the machine - the drum didn't survive the experience, the £100 or so bill wiped out any cost savings that would ever have been made.

*WhiteOut, Snowpake or Liquid Paper for those not familiar with the brand.

For those sort of fanatical bean counters, you need someone who has the ear of the managaing director/CEO/etc. Then you simply point out the time taken for an engineer/dev/non-minimum wage serf to go and visit the bean counter. Multiply that by their billable rate, and multiply it again by the number of engineers/devs/non-minimum wage serfs. Whatever number pops up will undoubtedly be significantly higher than the stationary expenditure of people grabbing their own Pens (even if they take, God forbid, 2 pens at the same time! *shock horror*).

Admittedly, that only works if you have someone who can have a quiet word with the CEO. And the CEO isnt shagging the FD. But those are tales for another time...

My tale is from the early 1990s, before PowerPoint was invented to bring joy into our lives, and presentations were done using acetate sheets on an overhead projector (kids, go ask your grandparents).

Our department's very expensive photocopier was rendered unusable when someone fed regular acetate sheets through it instead of the special heat-resistant ones. The sheets simply melted onto the drum. The perpetrator had fled the scene, but he had left the originals of his slides in the machine, so the departmental administrator was able to identify him and deliver an appropriate bollocking.

I've definitely suffered all of those, the re-use of labels one with an early(ish) Tektronix Phaser printer, which was never quite the same after I'd peeled the labels off. Fair enough in some ways; she was an office temp and had probably never used anything more up-to-date than a daisy wheel printer and of course, as a temp, no-one thought that maybe she would need to be given any kind of induction to the company.

As for the Phaser, the printer in the OA sounds like it's meant to be a Phaser ("large blocks of crayon") but neither that Tektronix model, nor the much later Xerox model I used at home for many years, had any kind of oil reservoir. Sure, they would not have taken kindly to being tipped upside down while operating, but spilling oil? Maybe a tiny dribble of liquid wax from the small reservoirs. Perhaps this was a different beast.

M.

Are you sure about that Martin?

I'm fairly certain that at least some of the the Phasers had an oil reservoir of some sort because there was a wiper blade that smeared a thin coating over the drum before the melted wax crayon was put on in so that it slid off onto the paper properly? It's been a while since I've worked on them, but there was a very small oil reservoir replaced as part of the maintenance kit, my service manuals would suggest?

We were always warned not to tip them because of the molten wax rather than the oil - having seen the results when a colleague moved a hot printer, I can see why - ink all over the print surface, effectively wrote the machine off!

ETA: I've just remembered there was another colour laster printer I was once exposed to which did, indeed have an oil reservoir in - I remember it being an evil, evil thing. The school I was working at bought it second-hand in around 2001, and it was a damned nuisance. Minolta, perhaps? It was an absolute sod, and needed something done damned near every day to keep it going, and the quality was - questionable - at best.

Those two machines I mentioned, I can't be absolutely certain the first one had no oil, but I did some first-line maintenance with it and do not recall ever having to check oil. Then again, it was mid 1990s, and a lot of life has happened since then!

The machine we had at home for about 12 years? No, absolutely no oil. Maintenance (apart from topping up the crayons) was a waste tray that collected ink dribbles (only needed replacing if it actually broke as it could be easily emptied) and a cartridge with some kind of woven paper material (like nappy liner) on a roll which was used (I think) to wipe excess ink from the nozzles. I suppose that material might have been very lightly lubricated, but didn't seem that way when you were swapping it out. The drum was scraped with a squeegee affair. Never had to replace that, but I ended up getting rid of the printer when it needed a new drum (life expired, not actually failing) and I worked out that the cost of the drum kit alone (which might well have included a new squeegee and other bits) was about the same as a new, faster, colour laser which came with toner equivalent to a complete set of new crayons, and of course I needed crayons for the Phaser too.

That laser printer is (erm, finding it difficult to remember) maybe seven years old by now and every time I have to buy toner it grates that the cost of a complete set of (original) toner is about the same as the cost of a brand new printer. The one thing stopping me adding to the needless e-waste problem is the fact that my current printer has a 550-sheet paper tray and last time I looked, nothing currently on offer in the same price bracket had more than a 250 sheet tray.

Tell you what, though. I do miss the slightly raised print from the Phaser. It gave a certain "high class" look and feel to everything you printed, especially on card stock. Its rendering of photographs was not quite as good as the laser, but for text and graphics, hands-down the best printer I've ever used.

M.

Those partially used label sheets haunt me in my dreams... It works just fine until it doesn't, and when it goes bad, it goes very, very bad.

The boss insisted we reused old print-outs in the laser printer by printing on the back. This was a false economy anyway as it often didn't work and you had to print again - the extra toner cost more than the paper you saved.

I'm not sure what eventually happened but I suspect someone re-used a sheet of paper that had a staple in it. The replacement drum cost far more than any saving.

had a staple in it

You've just reminded me of another one, at my current employer. A £1,500 autofeed HP scanner (originally part of a document management system costing several £1,000s that had mysteriously disappeared before I arrived) where the feed mechanism was wrecked by a staple. It simply wasn't worth the cost of repairing or replacing the feeder as MFDs were starting to come in by then.

I spent a few years as a warranty certified repair tech for a number of printers, and staples and drawing pins were par for the course. Sellotape round the rollers of a document feeder on an MFP was good, but not as much fun to remove as the blu-tac which one user didn't remove before putting their sheets into the printer.

All, of course, while swearing to the hell-desk that they hadn't put anything other than paper in it.

Users...

How about the FD who didn't understand there was a differenc between inkjet labels and laser labels? Bought 500 sheets of inkjet labels because they were cheaper and managed to destroy the developer unit in our colour photocopier/printer/scanner when the labels got stuck to the fuser roller, about £140 for a new unit. We ended up binning all the rest of the labels as well as we didn't actually have any inkjet printers anywhere in the company.

Back in the day when overhead projectors were a thing, I've seen musltiple cases where people bought the wrong transparencies because they were cheaper, and melt them inside laser printers while trying to print on them.

[once?] marketed as Twink in New Zealand for which Kiwis raise a few eyebrows in AU when they use "twink" as a verb.

[1]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/correction_fluid

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/correction_fluid

I once watched a civil engineer attempt to clear a jammed multifunction business printer by jamming a metal metre ruler right up its guts, destroying one of the drums in the process.

One genius decided in the early-mid 1990s that the department spent too much on printer/photocopy paper and decreed that students were to provide their own paper for the common use Apple Laserwriters.

Of course the number of paper jams skyrocketed.

The prize for the most imaginative went to the student that tried using onionskin (25·39 gm paper) which was then typically used with typewriters for the carbons, or for airmail letters (where postage was by weight.)

In the event it wasn't too hard to remove as any organic component appeared to have been vaporised leaving a mineral shell that hadn't adhered to the rollers etc and could be cleanly lifted away.

During an absence someone had seriously screwed a Laserwriter and I found on my return the paper policy had been rescinded.

I've got many, many stories of users messing up printers beyond repair while trying to solve basic tasks, here's some highlights:

1. A brave attempt at swapping out a toner cartridge. Unfortunately the user didn't realise a locking tab was in place, which also closed the opening in the cartridge. Their solution was to simply apply more force. Aftermath? The room was coated top to bottom in black carcinogenic dust! It genuinely looked like an explosion had taken place, the entire printer was coated, and a streak ran up the wall across the ceiling over to the other side! Bonus points for the brave soul who wanted to clean this up using a wet mop, at least they tried. I ended up printing a biohazard sticker (on a different printer) and sticking it on the door, and calling in a professional cleaner. I really wish i could've seen the perpetrator, this stuff is probably worse than the ink bombs they use for money.

2. Paper jam in a small simplex mono printer (i mention this because it's not some large MFP with a bunch of rolls and pulleys). They managed to solve the paper jam using their tool of choice: a knife! Unfortunately they also stabbed the drum to death. Of course none of this was mentioned in the service request, the printer just stopped working. We were shocked the first time, ended up replacing the printer (drum replacements weren't economically viable for those small printers). End of story? Nope! less than a week later the exact same story! The client followed our recommendation, and they implemented a new policy for that location, where only a few select users were "trained" at refilling paper, and any other task had to be performed by service techs...

3. Printer in a primary school, for some reason there weren't any rooms available that children couldn't reach. They called because of a really bad paper jam and a bunch of error codes. I have no clue how, but a child had managed to jam a colored pencil waaay into the innards of the printer. I was genuinely impressed! (I'm saying it was a child, but i have no way to be sure of that. It's a bit of a coping mechanism to assume it's a child, but realistically it could've been another improvised tool to "solve" a paper jam.)

I suspect if they had lit up to ponder their efforts a decent dust explosion could been on the cards.

Sounds like the Xerox solid ink printers (Xerox bought the tech from someone else, I do believe it's kinda ancient), essentially melted wax printers

Those are (were? I'm not sure if they are made anymore) quite good looking compared to the color lasers. Nice and glossy finish, a bit like inkjets, and it didn't need photo paper for the glossiness. Though for photos, inkjets were still better.

Tektronix Phaser technology, lovely stuff and really useful for transferring images to other surfaces with an iron

They were very fussy though, took an age to come ready from power on and woe betide you if you didn't shut them down properly because they didn't always work when powered back up.

Tektronix?

Gory details [1]Wikipedia: Solid Ink printers .

Tanks of oil don't seem to be involved but the buggers don't like being moved before properly cooled down.

I have had academics swear by them and I don't doubt legions of IT support staff swear at them (the printers mostly...) instead we purchased an HP9000dn from a retailer at a closeout price (a lot less than half the price of a solid ink xerox phaser.)

About a decade later when the 9000 seemed to be dead we purchased another 9000 and when we installed the new 9000 beside the defunct one, the original 9000 magically revived and was still working a few years later when I stopped.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_Ink

I've had chance to think - I believe the "oil reservoir" is referring to the "drum maintenance kit" - service manual for a Xerox example here:

https://laserpros.com/img/manuals/xerox-manuals/phaser-8860-8860mfp-service.pdf

It's basically a roller full of some kind of oil/lubricant which is pressed onto the drum at the bottom of the rotation, and then a small wiper that spreads it thinly. The idea is that the oil stops the wax sticking to the drum. I seem to remember we were told not to transport the printers with the maintenance kit installed as well as ensuring they were cold before moving them. Always good for a coffee when the customer ignored your call to say you were 20 minutes out, please shut it down: "Oh, you didn't shut it down? Well now I'll just have to stop and have a brew while it cools..."

Sometimes kit just knows its going to be superseded or replaced and suddenly starts working correctly or behaving.

It's quite uncanny.

My previous job was working in a large, prestigious boarding school.

My job was mostly fixing printers and reincarnating dead PCs, and I was regularly called to work magic in the many boarding houses around town.

One of the 9 houses was mostly populated by rugby player, who made little use of IT, so I was rarely called up to that house, which was handy, as it was half a mile up a muddy track.

That was until one day when the house master needed to print something, and found the printer unresponsive, so I was called for.

Upon examination, I found a paper jam, which on the Brother printers we used in the houses was an easy fix as they had few parts to remove to reveal the paper path.

Once freed, I discovered the jammed paper was a piece of lined paper from a refil pad, one that had already been written on, the jam caused by the jagged edges of the torn paper.

Why anyone at a £50k a year school thought it was a good idea to run writing paper through a printer was beyond me.

Anyway, the house master was so happy he could print his letters he gave me a couple of bottles of wine and I never had to visit that house again in my time at the school.

Don't lend kit to a tool.

They should have taken the Malcolm Tucker approach to clearing a paper jam:

https://youtu.be/M9spU_T9Oys

The Mrs Doyle is strong in this one....