Tales from the Printer Guy: No user serviceable parts inside. No serviceman serviceable parts either. Tech Support |
- Tales from the Printer Guy: No user serviceable parts inside. No serviceman serviceable parts either.
- Why are they mad at me for telling them I’m not HR
- Needing to vent - this is the right place I guess
| Posted: 30 Apr 2021 02:16 PM PDT I do laser printer and photocopier repair. Yes, I'm the "copier guy" that you call when the machine is printing awful black marks down the sides of every page, making that horrible grinding noise and jamming all the time. I genuinely do enjoy my job - I love printers. I like how they work, I enjoy fixing them, and I know them very well. I realize this is strange... I even had one tech say "Damn. Really? Now I can no longer say that I've never met a tech that likes printers" Eek. Has it really been this long? Seriously? Five years since my last post here? I used to have a lot of fun typing up stories here. Ooh, my name still has a little printer next to it! pets the little printer I guess I let life get in the way of what is important: Reddit. But, in all seriousness, yes, I still work on printers - although last year has answered the eternal question: "If a printer breaks and nobody is around to use it, does it generate a service ticket?" No. No it doesn't. Also, printers do seem to need users around to wear them out, those maintenance counters don't increment themselves! In any event, here's a recent story, and a cautionary tale about being incredibly confident in your abilities... I get a service ticket about an HP CP5225 that's making streaks along all the printouts. I go out to look at it, and the streaks vary in severity on subsequent prints, but are overall in specific spots. They're composed of a muddy, mixed color smear - so not limited to a single color. Not a simple scratched drum. And the problem is clearly in the imaging side of things - the fuser isn't causing this. The machine is in great condition, not particularly high page count. I pull the transfer belt out and have a look at it, and I can see some lines on it - but blowing the toner off clears it away, the belt's surface is not scratched or worn. In fact, the belt looks perfect. OK, so it has to be something up with the cleaning assembly. In a color printer like this, the image formation relies on something called an intermediate transfer belt, or ITB. Sometimes simply a "transfer belt". This is a wide, shiny black plastic belt, a bit wider than the widest paper the machine can print - and longer too, wrapped into an assembly that looks a bit like a treadmill. The belt goes past all four imaging drums, and receives the toner from each individual drum from the four colors, building up a complete color image that is then transferred to the paper in one swell foop as the paper is fed through. Of course, as with any toner transfer process, just like in the drums of a toner cartridge, not every single particle of toner is transferred from the belt to the paper. It therefore needs to be cleaned - this is accomplished by some sort of soft rubber blade and a cleaning mechanism that's pressed against the belt as necessary, which squeegees the toner off the belt, and into a hopper, where it's conveyed into a waste toner bottle somewhere in the machine. Some printers simply have a reservoir for waste toner in the belt itself, and thus the belt has an expected finite life and needs to be replaced when this container is full. The HP CP5225 is not designed like this - it uses a transfer belt that's designed to last a long time, and the toner is conveyed into a separate container for disposal. From looking at the lines and the way they're formed, the fact they're on the belt and made of multiple colors, I can tell that the problem is in this cleaning blade assembly. Furthermore, if you print a couple of the full color demo pages, the lines get way worse in subsequent prints. It's obviously toner getting caught and redistributed. Printing enough blank pages cleans it up, but then of course, more normal printing makes it bad again. The cleaning assembly is an integral part of this transfer belt and not meant to be removed. Some larger machines have a separate, replaceable cleaning blade that just slots in. Not this one. But without taking the belt apart, I can loosen some stuff, get a piece of paper in there and agitate the blade a bit, and carefully blow out some of the toner with canned air. This sort of fixes the problem - but only for a few dozen prints. Then it's back. Now, a normal, sane technician would simply replace the transfer belt. Or, simpler still, tell the customer to order a new one from their favorite office supply supplier and swap it themselves - it's a consumable, technically, and it does just slot in. But this is not a machine with a life counter for the belt, the belt is in fantastic condition and a new one is $400. But, huh, I can buy a new cleaning blade apparently. That'll be way cheaper! I can save the customer a lot of money, and just replace the broken part. <Insert ominous music here> An uncomfortably long amount of time later, as the replacement part took far longer to be delivered than I had expected, I'm back at the site. I've got the new cleaning blade, I've got my tools, two cans of air, a roll of paper towels, and cleaning cloths. I know this'll be a bit fiddly and messy, but how hard can it possibly be? They wouldn't sell the part if you couldn't swap it in the field - never mind that HP doesn't actually sell it and this is a third party component. I'm confident. I know printers really, really, really well. And I'm incredibly good at taking complicated things apart and putting them back together. This should be easy. I run a print or two to verify, yes, the lines are still there. Open the side panel, pull out the transfer belt, and orient it on the counter so I can easily access the cleaning assembly. I snap a couple quick pictures of the gears and springs visible on the outside with my phone, just in case, and start taking things apart. Remember how I said I was confident? I have no idea if the manual has instructions for this. I didn't read it. I know how all this stuff works, I've taken apart hundreds of printers - this is all pretty obvious - no problem. <SpongeBob title card : "Twenty-Seven Minutes Later"> I've got the assembly all apart. The counter has a half dozen tiny gears, a couple of plastic guard thingies, some screws, a gear with a thing on it, another thing with a gear on it, and I've got the cleaning assembly open. Oh, and toner. Lots and lots of toner. You know what's in a cleaning assembly? Well, springs, for one. Lots of springs. And toner. Even more toner than springs, despite the high spring content. Their volume is easily outmatched by toner. I mean, was, because both toner and springs are now all over the counter, and I'm carefully dumping as much of the toner into a small trash can as possible. My hands are completely brown with the mix of colored toner, I've got toner all over my arms and some on my jeans. Somewhere at this point, I manage to drop a tiny spring into the trash can. I saw it fall, and heard it hit the trash can liner. There's not much in this trash can apart from an empty paper cup, some paper towels from previous attempts at cleaning up toner, and a whole bunch of toner. But that spring is tiny, and it took me several minutes of rummaging around in toner to be able to locate it - which I did. I don't know which direction it fits on, or even what it does right now. But I'll burn that bridge when I get to it. First thing's first, I need to actually get the blade out of the assembly. I manage to unseat the blade on the one end, but the other end is trapped under a gear attached to the long spring that goes from one end of the unit to the other to act as an auger to move the toner to the outlet port. After freeing that and breathing in yet more toner, I've got the old blade out. Huh. OK, the new blade is literally just the blade and the pivot, the plastic fingers that the pivot rides on need to be moved over. No problem, pry those off, swap them. Fit the blade back in. Err, attempt to fit the blade back in. OK, got it, I think, wait, no that's not right, that cam goes under that, it has to? No, huh, it doesn't fit, wait, maybe over? Ooohhh... I have to put this spring here on this clip, hold these springs down, do that with the other spring and compress this and lever the cover back on and... OK, well, it made sense in my head. More fumbling with springs and stuff ensues, until I manage to get the main part of the assembly snapped back together. And it seems like it's actually together right! Oh, wait... I forgot a spring. That one that fell in the trash earlier, it's supposed to spring load the output door. OK, lever things JUST far apart enough to sneak that spring in, get it the right way around.... cool. That totally won't spring out later when I'm trying to put the pins in the sides that hold the gears on. Oh, and lovely, right, the whole assembly is on springs and is part of the tension for the belt. More springs. Tiny gears. Eventually, despite my best efforts, I managed to get it all back together, with no parts left over and no springs missing. I think. The toner mess didn't magically get better either, my hands and the counter are covered, and anything I touch will look like a crime scene investigation. I carefully clean up, wash my hands, slot the belt back into the printer, shut the door and cross my fingers. Never have I wanted a printer to work so badly. All I can think of is that I hope that I got everything in there straight and nothing is going to jam and bind when the belt turns. The machine hums to life and the display flashes... after a short while it stops and shows that it's ready. I run some prints through and... they're perfect. Absolutely perfect. Even the first one is perfect, I figured it would have toner crud on it, but the belt runs through several rotations upon putting it back in so it was already clean and ready to go. I ran a couple dozen test prints, and even re-run the full calibration and everything is fine. The customer is happy, the printer is fixed, and I can breathe a sigh of relief. Carefully. Away from the toner. I clean up the rest of my toner mess, wipe down my tools, pack everything up, wash my hands again, and sulk back to my van. Valuable lessons to take away from this experience. Just because you can fix something, doesn't mean you should. And just because you understand how something works and are confident you can take it apart and put it back together doesn't mean you should either. And next time I have a transfer belt with a bad cleaning blade, I should really bring a plastic tray to work in so I don't drop springs into a trash can when taking it apart. "My printouts are coming out wet!" [link] [comments]  |
| Why are they mad at me for telling them I’m not HR Posted: 30 Apr 2021 05:56 AM PDT I have a conversation like this every week because they just default to sending all calls to tech support and have us transfer them after our front desk person was promoted Caller-Do you guys have a guy named Pat in HR there? Me-I'm not sure but I can give you the number for HR. Caller-No I just wanna know if there's a Pat in HR. Me-I'm not at HR's location Caller-I know I'm asking if Pat works at your HR department Me-I don't have a list of HR employees, I'm a temp in IT here, but I can give you the number to contact HR's office Caller-Ugh never mind I'll just go figure it out click They aren't even in the same building, how am I supposed to know everyone in a different department 20 minutes down the road! [link] [comments]  |
| Needing to vent - this is the right place I guess Posted: 30 Apr 2021 01:11 PM PDT So I work in I.T. (obviously, or wouldn't be posting here I guess) in state government. We have some people roll through with calls / emails / tickets that probably shouldn't be allowed around a T.V. remote let alone Outlook and other state web based applications. Here is but the latest one I spend 24 minutes on the phone with. Think about that again. 24 minutes on the phone. You will understand why this is so unbelievable in a moment. Ok - User has a ticket that he put in. In it it says every time he opens up one browser based program, another one closes out. No other supporting documentation. I blindly have the client ( I've dealt with this person before; I reluctantly took the ticket as I'm the only one assigned to do so in my region ) call me so we can begin troubleshooting. His English is very broken and hard to understand. He's hidden away in an obscure office attached to a medical facility, and I secretly think his bosses put him their simply because they can't fire people at the state. This guy is as dumb as a box of rocks. ME : Yessir, please click XX and let me know what your IP is. I will remote in and watch you duplicate the problem so I know what is going on. ME : Ok, watch for a dialogue box with " approve " to come up, please click it. ---------------I attempt to remote in 3 times over the next 4 minutes before he FINALLY sees the box and it doesn't time out and I have to restart the entire process--------------- ME : Ok, I'm watching now. Can you please duplicate the problem so I understand what is going on? EU : repeats the same thing again. I don't understand what is going on. ----------21 minutes into the call and having it repeated 5 times-------- Me : you are trying to access both sites at the same time? Get off the phone with my wife laughing from head to toe grinning at me, can't stop laughing ( I work from home, often work my I.T. tickets from home remotely unless I have to put physical hands on something. ) She's STILL laughing 15 minutes later as I type this up. *This is NOT a new employee . They have been with the state for probably 10+ years. They have to use the same software every. Single. Day to do their jobs. How they did not understand that by going to a whole nother website while in their current browser with out opening it in a new tab or browser window would close out the previous one is beyond me. I'm still in shock and awe at the stupidity of this. The dumbest people get jobs working for government. [link] [comments]  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Tales From Tech Support. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
No comments:
Post a Comment