Our office recently had a major computer upgrade and I, our resident “tech geek”, was away the week that this was all installed with the flu. I get back a week later and the users all come barreling at me saying that the new printer won’t print from any other tray than the first tray in Word 2003 on the printer, no envelopes, no second tray.
So I poke around with the Word settings on several machines, killing a few trees in the process, no joy. So I get assigned the glorious task of calling the Help Desk.
I advise the tech who answers that we had been recently rolled out on the new hardware. It gets escalated to second-level support; their response after trying to fix things from their end is, “We’ll close the ticket on this and work on a solution.” By this point, the users are getting ready to shoot me.
So out of sheer desperation I decide to poke around in the XP Printers and Faxes settings. The default printer is right, so I then work my way down into the printer settings. This particular Dell printer requires that a “Printer Profile” be installed. Well, guess what? No printer profile is installed at all! I install the factory default profile and eureka!
We have the second tray and envelopes! I proceed to do this for all the users and the printing problems go away. Another second-level tech support calls a few days later and asks whether we’re still having printing issues. I told them that I had to resolve the issue *myself* and explained the steps I took.
The response I get is that I can be the tech support on printer issues for my area. Following that came the automated survey generated when a support call is closed. Let’s just say I hope whoever read my reply had asbestos sunglasses on.
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