About two metres from my desk at work, is one of those new multi-function polisprinter things. It’s been churning away all week, page upon page upon page. Most of the time the noise isn’t unbearable, but sometimes it does get difficult to concentrate. Whiz, whirr, ka-chunk, all week.
So yesterday morning, for the first time this week, I needed to print something – two measly pages. Do you think it would do it for me? Hell no! Some kinda of network printer server outage.
And what’s particularly annoying is Word didn’t just come back and say “hey, I can’t do it”. No, it sat there for about two minutes with the print dialogue hung, Word disabled, while it worked out that it couldn’t do it. Somewhere, there’s a timeout setting that’s set way too high. I reckon if it’s not working in 30 seconds, it’s not working period. I’ll go rummaging around in the settings.
Daily occurance in this office. *siiiiigh*
I also have noticed that the multifunction units are noiser. They seem to have loose bits because of the number of things they have to do in a small box. Why not have a bunch of dedicated units, and then to make a multifunction thing just bind them all together with packing tape? It’d probably rattle less. But the picture on the box wouldn’t look so good.
Wrap the bastard up in bubblewrap. That’ll drop the amount of noise it generates. It might also cause heat stress, leading to a replacement.