Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Conflict in ink

Yesterday, my printer stopped working. Just…stopped. Everything I tried to print came back with “Your document failed to print.”

I tried the old tech standby of turning everything off and back in again, AND the equally old trick of reseating the cables. (Pull out the plug, put it back in.) Didn’t work. Humph.

I then fell back on tech trick #3, which is to go get a cup of coffee while I ponder the possibilities. While attending to trick #3, I made a critical mistake: I mentioned the issue to my husband, with a bit of whining because I had a contract I needed to print, sign and mail ASAP. (That last part was the biggest mistake. If I'd just been printing pictures of puppies or something, he probably would have found more important things to do last night.)

IMMEDIATELY, Mr. Please Stand Aside Ma’am I Have Years Of Experience In This Sort Of Thing leapt into action.

Things were uninstalled. Reinstalled. Moved about. Turned on and off. Caches were cleared. Disks were loaded.

The printer still wouldn’t work.

A few minutes into these proceedings, I humbly submitted that perhaps it was a port conflict issue. See, I recently added a new peripheral to my family of doohickeys, and it had caused a COM error on the…

Thank you for your input ma’am, and I will now ignore you and continue with the installing / uninstalling / cussing / wrangling and otherwise messing about with this device in the most technical manner possible.

Two computers were running all night, in my bedroom, working on this problem. (Ask me why I’m a bit cranky this morning – go ahead, ask – oh, why am I cranky this morning? Funny you should ask! I’m cranky BECAUSE! Two computers were going “HUM!” in my bedroom all night, THAT’S why!)

This morning they still hadn’t finished when Mr. Please Stand Aside Ma’am I Have Years Of Experience In This Sort Of Thing had to leave for an offsite meeting at Crack-o-Dawn-o’clock.

“I dunno,” he said as he headed for the door. “There’s nothing wrong on the computer-side, so it must be something wrong with the printer. You’ll probably have to call HP to troubleshoot it.”

This I need. Hours on the phone waiting for somebody at HP to not be able to help me troubleshoot my printer. “Well ma’am, we have an exact copy of your printer here in our office, and it’s working just fine…”

I got the kids off to school.

Came home.

Rebooted / reseated everything one more time.

Tried to print.

It didn’t work.

Engaged in Trick #3 again and contemplated options. Noted that printer was still plugged into the same port, ergo my humble suggestion in re: port conflict had not been noted.

Unplugged the printer from Port 1 and plugged it into Port 3.

Tried to print again.

It printed just fine.

Port conflict error confirmed.

I win.

The end.

9 comments:

Yarnhog said...

So now you have to decide whether the pleasure of pointing this out to Mr. Stand Aside is worth the aggravation of dealing with a wounded male ego. (I know. It's really no contest. Still, you have to be ready for the consequences.)

Heather said...

Isn't winning awesome?

Kris said...

Love it!

BTW - I'm so glad that CA has come so far in the last year. It is a relief that the Powers That Be are also wise enough to leave him in the System, just in case. Sounds like a win-win to me.

21stCenturyMom said...

Are these USB ports because USB ports are not supposed to have port conflicts. That was the point, right? I mean really - you don't have SERIAL ports on that thing, do you?

Anyhow - good job!

Anonymous said...

Oooookay. "Port conflict", to my simple mind, means folks arguing about who gets to come into the harbor first. Or maybe the Boston Tea Party. I had no idea computers cared about such things. Guess you learn something every day! :-)

Kaviare said...

I'ma fan of trick # 2.1, which is, take plug out. BLOW ON IT. Plug plug back in.

You'd be amazed.

J said...

You know, I think we might be married to the same man. Or maybe his brother!

Unknown said...

I probably read half a million words a day--on a slow day. This was the best of the month! LOL!!!

Note to 21stcenturymom: Once it works, all questions are supposed to stop, knowwhatimean???
;-)

Lydee said...

LOL! been there, done that. But why haven't I learned from my mistakes?