Always helpful!

As I mentioned in my last post, despite my status as a technophobic technophile (or maybe because of it), I frequently find my life revolves around all things computer. There are even times in my life that I would appear to the right audience as even having a clue what I am about. How else would I survive in tech support for Microsoft? The truth of the matter is I know just enough to understand that something CAN be done, and usually enough to then break things as I try to do it. Which then requires much research and annoyance trying to fix it. Resulting in me taking hours to do what someone who actually has a clue could probably do in minutes.

Having seen both sides of the tech support world, I have encountered many amusing things both on the side of the breakers AND the fixers. With all the breaking and fixing, I have found that there are certain features of computing whose functionality is directly proportionate to your need of the feature. For instance it is a documentable fact that printers (especially networked printers) will work perfectly except when you actually NEED to print something. Then they will not print for some obscure reason that all the troubleshooting wizards in the world will not be even remotely able to explain.

Fortunately the technical gods who actually make computers "user-friendly" often anticipate potential issues, and have a whole series of useful error messages pop up to guide you into salvation. For instance, yesterday when I was trying to print up some bank records in an effort to figure out a pesky little $5000 discrepancy between the bank’s records and ours, I was rewarded with a distinct lack of things printing. Thankfully I had quite a bit of help with resolving the printing issue when I got an error message that essentially said "The page could not print because a printer error prevented it from printing."

So let me get this right. The reason the printer had an error was because it had an error.

I feel the need to express my gratitude to the amazing and thoughtful minds behind such useful tips. Without that essential bit of information I would never have been able to fix the issue!