A’ight, Bruv. Paper jam. PC Load Letter. The machine knows you are in a hurry.
Every office has one. A printer that has not worked properly since the Obama administration. It sits in the corner like a retired villain, humming quietly, occasionally making grinding noises for no reason, and the moment anyone needs to print something urgent — a boarding pass, a contract, a document that must be signed in the next 15 minutes — it activates its primary function: not printing.
I work in IT. I have seen things. I have been called to investigate printers that were unplugged. Printers that were out of paper despite the tray being full. Printers that displayed error codes not documented in any manual — codes that appear to have been invented by the printer itself, in real time, out of spite. I have witnessed a printer refuse to print a black-and-white document because it was out of cyan ink. Cyan. For a monochrome print. The printer knew. The printer did not care. The printer has never cared.
The printer is the office psychopath
There is a theory — not a scientific one, but one developed over decades of shared trauma among IT professionals — that printers are not actually broken. They are selectively functional. They choose when to work. The test page — the one you print when IT is standing right there, watching — always comes out perfectly. The boarding pass — the one you need printed in four minutes or you will miss your flight to KL — triggers an error condition that the manufacturer’s support line will describe as “unusual” and “possibly related to the firmware.”
Printers are the only office equipment that inspires genuine, sustained rage in otherwise calm professionals. Nobody has ever punched a monitor. Nobody has ever kicked a keyboard across the room (well, maybe once). But printers? Printers have been physically assaulted in workplaces since the first LaserJet rolled off the assembly line. The famous scene in Office Space where they take the printer into a field and destroy it with a baseball bat — that scene resonated because it was not comedy. It was documentary. Every office worker watching it thought: yes, that printer deserves this.
The economics of printer hatred
Printers are not designed to work well. They are designed to sell ink. The printer itself is often sold at a loss — the real money is in the cartridges, which cost more per millilitre than vintage champagne. The printer knows this. The printer’s firmware is optimised not for printing, but for convincing you that the magenta cartridge — which you have used exactly zero times — is “low” and must be replaced immediately, and by the way, the replacement cartridge costs more than the printer did.
This is not a bug. This is the business model. Printer manufacturers are not in the business of helping you print documents. They are in the business of selling you coloured water at a 400% markup. The printing is just the delivery mechanism for the recurring revenue. And as long as offices keep buying RM200 printers that require RM180 cartridges every three months, the cycle continues. The printer does not need to work well. The printer just needs to work just well enough that you do not throw it out the window. And even then, only barely.
The paperless office lie
We were promised a paperless office. In the 1990s, futurists told us that computers would eliminate the need for physical documents. Everything would be digital. Email would replace memos. PDFs would replace printouts. The printer would become obsolete, a relic of a bygone era, like the fax machine or the floppy disk.
It is 2026. We print more than ever. Not because we need to — because someone in accounting prefers paper. Because the boss wants a “hard copy.” Because the government form still requires a physical signature. Because the person in the meeting “cannot read things on screens.” The paperless office is like the flying car: technically possible, occasionally demonstrated, never actually arriving. And so the printer survives. The broken one in the corner. The one that jams every Thursday. The one that eats page three of every five-page document. The one that you have learned to whisper sweet nothings to before pressing Print, because you have developed a superstition that it responds to kindness. It does not. But you do it anyway. XAXAXA!
Related: The Unspoken Rules of IT Support — more truths from the IT department that your office needs to hear.
