Today at work one of my colleagues asked me to help him with a print problem he was having, being the helpful IT Support person I am I investigated further...
I found out that he was attempting to print of a PDF catalog of products & prices from a certain supplier. (no problems so far) However he was attempting to print said document in colour, but the printer was just spitting out blank pages (strange).
First I thought it might have something to do with his colour access code not sending through to the printer correctly (nope, I was wrong) so I asked him to send me a copy of the document so that I could attempt printing it myself (... and here is where it gets interesting)
After having a brief look over the document I was perplexed why he needed the document in colour when the only colour in the entire document was the suppliers logo/colours as a background image (think an A4 page just obliterated with darkish blue hues), so I questioned if he even needed to have the document in colour at all ? (fairly straight forward question I thought)
In an attempt to be useful I figured I'd print the document in it's glory in wonderful Black & White, so to highlight the fact that no information was lost in the process (this didn't work either). The printer not playing fair decided that it would have a bit of a "brain-fart" in the middle of the day, so I rebooted it (powercycle FTW) and re-sent the black & white print request.
Shortly afterwards the printer buzzed to life and started to spit out the document as I had asked it to (awesome problem solved, or so I thought). Once the printer had finished I wanted to be thoughtful and stapled & hole-punched it all ready for my colleague to use.
To my surprise it seemed that my efforts were in vain, despite the document being a perfectly valid and useful piece of material (it's at this point I would like to apologize to any tree's reading this) he declared quite boldly... "this isn't any good to me, I want it in colour" and then proceeded to re-print the suppliers information in it's full (hideous) colour glory.
While I don't have to personally pay for the paper or the toner that was wasted, I feel somewhat diminished that my suggestion to just use a black & white copy fell on deaf ears and also made me consider just how wasteful some people can be.
On that last point I feel that I really should try my hardest to waste as little as possible in order to balance out others.
So do you know people like this, is there a Wasteful Wayne (not his actual name) in your life?
and if so is there anything you can do to help?
1 comment:
and now I feel better that I got that out :)
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