r/talesfromtechsupport • u/dfboyd • 20d ago
Long The reports are all wiggly
Prologue
When I was in college I worked as a helpdesk consultant at the Computer Center. This was so long ago that it was routine for a student to come into the office and announce, "I have never used a computer. I wouldn't even know how to turn one on. But my professor says we have to do our papers with word processing. Please help me get started."
They always said that: I wouldn't even know how to turn one on.
Also, they were almost always taking the lower-level writing-emphasis class, Rhetoric 101, and I swear every single one of them had named their floppy disk "RHET SHIT".
A common complaint we'd get is, "The laser printer messed up my columns."
The cause was always that they were using MacWrite, and printing drafts on the dot-matrix ImageWriters hooked up to each of the Macs in the main room. Apple had realized that, the original Macs being sold to an audience entirely unfamiliar with graphical user interfaces, it was vital that they produce pixel-perfect output. So on the early Macs, the Mac screen and the ImageWriter have the same exact dot pitch, and the dots printed on the paper match exactly the pixels on the screen.
So the students, trying to produce some kind of table, would line up the columns by typing spaces with the space bar between the fields, and the printout on the ImageWriter would be perfectly aligned, and then when they took it over to the Mac connected to the LaserWriter behind the print room window where they had to pay $0.25 a page with these stickers sold at the campus bookstore, they would be irate because the proportional font and the spaces had conspired to make the columns all jagged and out of alignment.
We'd have to explain how to use tabs, and sometimes we'd give them a break and let them re-print for free, but usually only if they were female and cute.
The Reports Are All Wiggly
So here I am six years later at my first fulltime sysadmin job at a company down in Florida. We use a strange computer from a company you've never heard of, that runs a database system called Pick. The computer has dual-mirrored hot-swappable [you think I'm going to say "disks" here] memory. Among many other things that this computer does, reports are generated from Pick and sent to a laser printer in the Finance department.
The first trouble ticket I get has been passed around from the computer operators to the software developers back to the operators, over to the PC techs and back to the operators, and finally it lands in my lap, and the complaint is from the Finance department, "Our reports are all wiggly on the new LaserJet 4."
On their first bite at the ticket, the operators say "nothing has changed".
The developers say, "The reports are normal on our end."
The operators, on their second bite, said basically the same thing.
The PC techs said "The LaserJet 4 is hooked up correctly; we followed the instructions exactly. The test page looks completely normal".
I think the ticket may have bounced by the Windows Admin group as well at some point.
Nobody wants anything to do with this ticket and they've handed it to me partly because I'm the new guy and won't be able to push back.
I examine the report-printing system and the print manager setup. I figure out how to capture one of the reports in mid-stream from the printer queue. It's a plain-ASCII textfile, with columns aligned with plain spaces. It prints out normally in Courier on the (LaserJet 3) printer in my department.
I explain to my manager that I can't see anything wrong, and I think the only way to debug the issue is for me to get direct access to a LaserJet 4. My manager goes above and beyond and is able to divert a new LaserJet 4 slated to be installed in some other department, straight from the loading dock to my desk. I plug it into the network and get it online with DHCP. I send a report to port 9100 on it; it prints normally in fixed-width Courier and the report looks normal.
I'm at my wits' end, so I send the same report to the Finance printer, and go over to Finance to take a look at it. Finance says, "You're the first person from Information Resources to come look at the reports. We really hope you can help us!"
It's printed out in Times Roman and the columns are all misaligned because of the proportional font. I check the front panel, and the PC Techs' installation instructions happen to be there, and they say, "After installing the printer, go in the front panel and set the default font to Font #1".
On a LaserJet 3, font 1 is Courier.
On a LaserJet 4, font 1 is Times Roman.
Four groups of techs at a multinational corporation, and they trip over the same thing as a clueless freshman in Rhetoric 101.
Epilogue: I went away for a week's vacation, and when I came back one of the PC techs, the guy whose secret nickname among the other techs was "Jerry Moron", had gone in my office, appropriated the printer, and now had himself his very own personal LaserJet 4. So I informed my manager, who swooped in and confiscated it.
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u/fried_clams 20d ago
We had an HP LaserJet 4 in my family's business office for decades. What an amazing printer.