Printers May Go Offline At Random

In honor of World Haiku Day ….

Third level is where we solve all of the rest of your problems. First level asks if you turned it off and turned it back on again, Second level helps you reinstall … but Third level gets deep in the code where sometimes things have just gone funky.

As a member of a Third level support and repair team, paired with my co-writer, we had a daily balance to strike as fixes came up for dispersal. How to summarize a six-week saga of installations in various languages, on disparate hardware, throughout a seemingly endless number of network configurations that, ultimately, made your printer go offline. At random.

It wasn’t necessarily dead, or completely not working. Maybe one app couldn’t connect. Or overwhelmed our virtual buffer. Or, or, or … it could be completely unreproducible, except for a handful out of thousands of users.

But you don’t care about all those other users. You care that you, or your user (gift registry print out or a VIP’s Confidential Fantasy Football roster), sometimes just doesn’t print, and all the rebooting in the world won’t fix it.

So we write out what we think will express the problem, and promise a solution. Not too much detail, but not too little. To explain a fix that hits your gift registry use case and that VIP’s roster sheet.

And in six languages. There’s the other bite – fixing it costs money, but when you’re fixing it in six languages, it helps to be economical, both in time and money. The simpler and more cohesive the fix explanation, the more quickly it can be translated and disseminated.

printers may go off
line at random press any key
ignore, retry, fail?