the good old days

I am the angry, disappointed owner of a Lexmark P6250 “All In One” printer. It scans, copies, and prints. (One thing that MOST printers of the all-in-one variety manage is to fax, as well; it’s my own fault for not thoroughly researching the specs before buying, but this one does not. However, Lexmark still loses points for making an all-in-one that’s really a most-in-one.)

It’s worked decently for two years. Then, suddenly, it starts having an intermittent problem… a big blank smear down the left side of any scan I try to make. Since I have an almost-paperless home office system, not being able to scan in and digitally store bills is a huge hassle. And since I got a big pile of family genealogy information that I need to scan in and share with cousins, it’s an even bigger hassle. I can usually only get about three pages scanned before the Big White Smear shows up, and then it’s done for the day.

Troubleshooting suggested cleaning the printer heads (?), making sure the printer is connected to the computer (?!?), and similarly pointless baloney. A tech support ticket was the only resort available. After suggesting that the “factory default settings” should be restored (and leaving me to wonder what possible setting could have been modified to have the scanner ignore 40% of the desired image) with no success, they revealed… that the printer is broken.

I know, shocking, right?

I asked about spare parts…

The issue appears to be with the scanner hardware, probably the scanner bulb.

Regarding the replacement part, I regret inform you that we do not carry a stock of spare parts for this printer model. Technology has allowed us to reduce the price of printers drastically; therefore, the cost of spare parts would exceed the cost of a new printer.

Anyone familiar with basic math should laugh in disbelief at this point. Printers are made of parts. Therefore, the cost of a printer can not be less than the cumulative cost of its parts. Therefore, each part has to cost less than a new printer; otherwise, Lexmark is selling printers at a drastic loss. Bullshit. They’re a business, not a charity.

So what’s really behind their disinterest in selling spare parts? They want you to buy the (probably more expensive) new printer when your old one dies. This is a peripheral, for pete’s sake, I don’t want to buy a new one every two years.

It’s not terribly likely that most (all?) other scanner/printer suppliers will provide better support for their products, but trying to spin me bullshit about “the end item costs less than its components” is one of the best ways to get me to never, ever buy from you again. The petty little bullshit, like making it difficult to convince the printer to use black ink only (it really prefers to print “black” using the more-expensive CMYK cartridge) and not having any fax functionality and a half-assed “troubleshooting” section of the manual, those were just petty annoyances. But making it unrepairable? Fuck you.

I am going to be buying a (probably more expensive) new peripheral, but it sure won’t be from Lexmark. Ever again.

That’s something my employer has been promising for years. “We are committed to the idea of a paperless office, and will strive to continually improve and reduce our paper usage and requirements.”

Now that the factory is closing (in 28 days… the countdown begins!), my primary responsibility is sorting through paperwork compiled by me and previous engineers over the 30 years the plant has been open. You may be thinking, “Gosh, that’s a lot of paper,” and you’d be right. I am throwing about 3,000 sheets an hour into the recycling bin (maybe 100/hour into the “to be shredded” pile, for confidential documents). There is a satisfying KAWHUMP sound as you drop a stack that big, driving home the point that this place was never even close to paperless.

On top of the vast quantity of discarded paperwork, there’s a smaller subset that we’re required to retain for ten years in case somebody wants to sue or there’s a massive Ford recall due to something we built. This is all lawyer-related. They want to be able to cover their asses and see whether or not we accounted for as-yet-unknown problems while manufacturing car parts. So, fine, we’re sorting some of the paper into tidy stacks in boxes, and labeling them, so in ten years they can be pulled out of a warehouse and shredded THEN. Again, helps us clearly see that our office environment is not paperless, and indeed it’s so un-paperless that our paper stays around longer than we do. You can’t get less paperless than that, right?

Wrong!

This just in from our local records retention coordinator:

Only electronic files that CANNOT BE RETAINED AS A HARD COPY will be saved by our IT department. All files currently on the server or in other data bases should be retained as a hard copy and stored in Record Retention boxes according to corporate guidelines.

Corporate has declared that we need to print out every single file we have stored on the server. We’re so un-paperless we’re using more paper while we get rid of all the paper!