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Why Paper Jams Persist (newyorker.com)
A trivial problem reveals the limits of technology. Fascinating story from The New Yorker: Unsurprisingly, the engineers who specialize in paper jams see them differently. Engineers tend to work in narrow subspecialties, but solving a jam requires knowledge of physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, computer programming, and interface design. "It's the ultimate challenge," Ruiz said.
"I wouldn't characterize it as annoying," Vicki Warner, who leads a team of printer engineers at Xerox, said of discovering a new kind of paper jam. "I would characterize it as almost exciting." When she graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology, in 2006, her friends took jobs in trendy fields, such as automotive design. During her interview at Xerox, however, another engineer showed her the inside of a printing press. All Xerox printers look basically the same: a million-dollar printing press is like an office copier, but twenty-four feet long and eight feet high. Warner watched as the heavy, pale-gray double doors swung open to reveal a steampunk wonderland of gears, wheels, conveyor belts, and circuit boards. As in an office copier, green plastic handles offer access to the "paper path" -- the winding route, from "feeder" to "stacker," along which sheets of paper are shocked and soaked, curled and decurled, vacuumed and superheated. "Printers are essentially paper torture chambers," Warner said, smiling behind her glasses. "I thought, This is the coolest thing I've ever seen."
"I wouldn't characterize it as annoying," Vicki Warner, who leads a team of printer engineers at Xerox, said of discovering a new kind of paper jam. "I would characterize it as almost exciting." When she graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology, in 2006, her friends took jobs in trendy fields, such as automotive design. During her interview at Xerox, however, another engineer showed her the inside of a printing press. All Xerox printers look basically the same: a million-dollar printing press is like an office copier, but twenty-four feet long and eight feet high. Warner watched as the heavy, pale-gray double doors swung open to reveal a steampunk wonderland of gears, wheels, conveyor belts, and circuit boards. As in an office copier, green plastic handles offer access to the "paper path" -- the winding route, from "feeder" to "stacker," along which sheets of paper are shocked and soaked, curled and decurled, vacuumed and superheated. "Printers are essentially paper torture chambers," Warner said, smiling behind her glasses. "I thought, This is the coolest thing I've ever seen."
This is Slashdot. The title invites a question, and TFS doesn't answer it.
After you and your buddy are fired
The article is jammed in a paywall.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I don't use them all that much and some have bizar/abysmal usability, but the machines themselves are a marvel of engineering IMHO. It's amazing how much of them are optimized to the T these days. And the print quality they put out is just as amazing. I remember smelling meth-spirits with purple ink of the repo machines back in primary school and I also remember the Star NL 10 dot-matrix impact printer. Noisy, ugly, dusty. I also remember the Sharp CE-126P -still have it.
Long story short, I think they are amazing and AFAICT paper jams with them have also gotten measurably less - although I do understand that those will never go away completely.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I am more interested in knowing why does it say "paper jam" when there is no paper jam.
As a former tester, I recall spending days trying to understand how and where jams occurred. My favorite paper jam issue was not one my team suffered, but another team that was working on a small laser jet printer.
One of the media ('paper types') that was suppose to be supported was transparencies. HP Printers allow you to specify the type of paper (to items like 'plain', 'cardstock', etc.), but many people would leave it at default. If the default was left, the printer needed to at least survive the print job, even if it was a bit of a mess. So those transparencies were a rather special case. The fuser, the part designed to join the bits of toner to the media, had to work in many different climates, from 65 F degrees, low humidity to 90+ F degrees, 90% humidity, and in order to make that fuser optimal, the printer had to compensate. With transparencies, as I recall, in the cold, the fuser would heat up a bit more to compensate and so with transparency, the fuser would fuse the the transparency to the fuser. We lost several million dollar prototypes's fusers and days of productivity to this issue. Ultimately, I believe HP decided it was cheaper to pay the warranty costs than it was to fix the issue.
which is probably not representative, paper jams persist because my employer buys the cheapest paper they can find. The kind that clumps and sticks to itself, that sheds paper dust like it's snowing, that has uneven edges, etc.
Proponents of A.I. keep telling us that the job of feeding individual sheets of paper from the paper tray to the printer will soon be automated.
Couldn't this be solved by simply putting an extra strong paper roller into the printer that simply feeds into some sort of paper shredder?
Is there no market for peopel willing to spend more on a paper jam-less printer?
Better than getting the "lp0 on fire!" message.
Xerox is the worst out of all, office printing nightmare...
They could at least have answered the age old question: "PC load letter? What the fuck does that mean?"
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
My favourite jam is still strawberry. Who cooks jam from paper anyway?
1) The jammed paper tray
2) The blinking red light
3) The manual in Chinese
WFT?!
I always thought people liked them...
The same people who bake pies using Ritz crackers for the filling? The recipe is on the Ritz box, but has anyone ever eaten such a thing?
Paper: Because I choose to.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
"PC Load Letter.
What the fuck does that mean?"
I can just imagine the printer in the year 2500.
The print button doesnt work well because of a bad electrical contact and you have to press 15 times to get it working. Then the paper jams and you have to get it out.
And then you get 7 copies because it actually did work part of the time but was just slow on the uptake.
I suppose that there's a bullet point on her resume stating that she discovered a new kind of paper jam. The people from HR probably just roll their eyes and think, "yeah, I've 'discovered' new types of paper jams, too..."
HP Jam Paper? What the fuck does that mean?
#DeleteFacebook
After fighting with an office copier and its endless jams for just a little over a year I still recoil at the sound of a copier door being opened. This person LOVES IT. What the actual fuck?!
"I wouldn't characterize it as annoying," Vicki Warner, who leads a team of printer engineers at Xerox, said of discovering a new kind of paper jam. "I would characterize it as almost exciting."
Well some people do get aroused by pain. Not my particular brand of vodka but to each their own.
I suppose we should be glad that people exist who find that sort of problem interesting. I certainly am not among them.
So many customers have been on the quest for the "paperless office" only to find after they discard all the paper controls and security workflow, putting it all on some database, that they end up printing even more paper. Why, because everyone just prints "the current report" without regard to whether they need to keep it or not.
It used to be with paper controls (signatures, checklists, etc) that the paper document was valuable, guarded, and stored. With paperless offices, people print like crazy without regard to the actual value of the document past a moment of use; they just like the tactile feel, easy markup, and ready in-person sharing of a physical piece of paper.
What the paperless offices do though, and do well, is remove the security and workflow of the paper-based office into an electronic form. In that aspect, a paperless office corporate project can be successful, but not for the surface level idea of vastly reducing paper use.
People like their hands and fingers, and they like touching things more than a featureless unresponsive pane of glass... I find "touch screen" to be an oxymoron; those things actually remove a human's sense of touch.
The reason that paper jams persist is because we persist in using paper in the first place.
While I apologize for how cheeky that might sound (can't help it, I'm Canadian), that doesn't mean it isn't true.
That's like the classic joke of a patient coming to a doctor and then raising one of their arms high over their head, says "Doc, it hurts when I do this!" and all the doctor says to him is "Well, don't do that!"
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It would have been slightly clearer in Europe as PC LOAD A4. Europe uses "A4" size paper, which doesn't share a name with a word that also generically means "document". Given the tech of the time, it might have been better to flash between two messages ADD PAPER and LETTER SIZE (or A4 SIZE for Europe).
into a pie filling, not the box.
...by storing the paper in a small climate-controlled room.
It's moisture that makes the paper jam.
Paperless office ?
an anecdote:
Years ago I was at a meeting where I was told by a member of another organisation that "we are supposed to have a blame free culture" to which I responded with a completely off the cuff remark that "a blame free culture is about as likely as a paperless office".
Fast forward about 8 months and at a presentation by a member of that organisation to a group of us working in a multi company team and my words appeared almost verbatim on a PowerPoint slide covering "real world viewpoints".
Still applies nearly 20 years later
This is caused by frustration over 1 thru 9. Smack-repair appears to work on the Millennium Falcon, and real-life in RC robot sports fighting* ("Battlebots"), so people keep doing it.
* I've seen several instances where a "dead" bot comes to life when the competitor whacks it again. One driver kept shouting "please hit me, please hit me!" It's usually best to leave stopped bots alone. Of course, whacking may make something temporarily work, but is not a good long-term repair strategy for office equipment.
Table-ized A.I.
Printers are essentially paper torture chambers,
This is why printers should come with the obligatory paper fondelers, or tissue fondelers. Soft robotics to the rescue!
Coming from the New Yorker, this is pretty much what you would expect from the sort of people who can write pages of glib rhetorical flourishes but don't understand what it is that they're talking about. But they do love their dead trees.
If you think a paper jam is not annoying you are retarded! Ever seen office space you fucking idiot? It's like saying, I wouldn't classify murder as killing. You want to be be so god damn clever you ignore any semblance of common sense.
Stop printing hardcopies?
Just wondering why anyone thought we need that detail? Glasses? We need to know she's a geek?
I hate printers, and photocopiers.
It doesn't help that people expect them to do EVERYTHING - colour, fold, staple, multiple sizes, collation, bookleting, etc. all in the same job.
If we could remove them, about 10-25% of my job would disappear and I wouldn't be sad at all. To be honest, few things that we print out are actually necessary at all. It's people who can't work on the screen who propagate the problem.
I'm a mathematician. I'll give you handwriting/paper for mathematical formulae. For everything else, just put it on a document and share it with people. There's no need to print it out.
In my life I've owned precisely two printers. A Sharp JX-9200 and a Samsung ML-4500. The first was a "winprinter", mono laser with parallel port. I used it via a NetportExpress for over a decade and it needed precisely nothing to work for all that time. The Samsung was a "real" printer that didn't require all kinds of custom CUPS junk and was still parallel - it also worked off the Netport and required precisely two parts in its life - a HUGE bottle of generic toner (literally a powder in a big jug). And one drum. I think I bought a rubber paper roller for it once, too, but it was literally pence and I could have used anything of the right size that had grip as it was just floating on a metal rod... I could have just taped the existing one, but the old one literally wore flat from being a ridged wheel because it saw so much use.
Everything I've ever dealt with professionally before, during or since has been a huge heap of junk that requires so much attention, toner, ongoing maintenance, un-jamming and faffing that I can't be bothered with them. About the only printer I've used at work which I'd have considered was a HP Laserjet 4 (might be a 4V?) which came kinda close in terms of reliability.
I've never owned an inkjet in my life, those are just a complete waste and always have been.
I don't even own a printer now. I can't fathom why I'd really want to. The rare times I need to print something out, it's never urgent and I'll borrow someone else's (work, friends, the local newsagent). Hell, it's actually cheaper to pay for an online service that you email a PDF to and they print it, envelope it, put postage on it and post it for you in one hit. Let them deal with whatever huge automated monstrosity they have that does all that for them.
Hell, last time I flew, you could just scan the boarding pass direct from a phone. You don't even need to print out plane tickets any more.
Be suspicious of people who live by paper. It suggests they don't know how to use basic search-in-file tools, they want to swamp you in necessary data that's hard to analyse or modify, and that they can't read things on screen because they can't operate the computer sufficiently.
1970 we had a slow line printer (fan fold paper). 100 lines a minute and folded OK at the back, but as soon as a form feed printed on a page only about 1/3 full it spun the paper so fast that it started folding backwards and soon jammed the printer and we got 10000 lines on 1 page.
I've had experience with 3 major brands of large floor standing copiers, Xerox, IBM, and Ricoh.
Xerox copiers were the fastest but would jam 1 out of every 500 pages. Fanning the paper before loading the paper trays would help minimize the frequency of jams.
IBM copiers were the worst but this was due to some extent as the result of administrative assistants not following instructions. Fanning the paper was mandatory otherwise the copier would jam within the first 50 pages (this was with IBM brand copier paper, too.) The copiers would also suffer constant breakdowns but this was also largely due to the admins doing stupid shit like running staple paper through the form feeder. Whoever said women are bright never met an administrative assistant, they are great at being social and managing someone's schedule but that's it.
Ricoh copiers are the best of them all. I've only seen them jam when people try to print landscape data on a portrait layout using the wrong size paper for the job. The copier tries it's best to autosize and make things fit but gets confused and errors-out in the middle of printing. Fanning the paper has never been necessary and the admins have yet to break them. The only downside is they are slow to wake up from sleep compared to IBM and Xerox copiers.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!