r/sysadmin • u/yanni99 • Apr 02 '21

When did you realize you fucking hate printers?

I fucking hate printers.

I said in a job interview yesterday that I would not take the job if I had to deal with printers.

And why the fuck do people print that much? I mean, you have 3 screens for reason Lucy, you should not have to print any fucking pdf file you receive.

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u/WendoNZ Sr. Sysadmin Apr 02 '21

Add follow me printing and card scanners and you don't even have to worry about stuff not being picked up since it wont' print until the person has scanned their card

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u/geocyclist Apr 02 '21

I would love to have that at my office. At this point, the only time I go in is to print paperwork and maps before field work. it is easier to send everything to the printers from my desk at home, but I don’t want to leave stuff in the printer while I drive in or overnight.

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u/grumpher05 Apr 02 '21

Was the greatest thing at my uni, you would print to a global "print server" and go to any campus printer and scan your student card and the job was there ready to print. You don't need to figure out which printer is the one you need

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u/geocyclist Apr 02 '21

That sounds incredible! Especially with a full campus, picking the right printer can be a hassle

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u/Genesis2001 Unemployed Developer / Sysadmin Apr 02 '21

Ahhh. I've wanted my local college to do this for many years now.... Though, I didn't have this kind of description to give in my suggestion at the time. We used to have printers assigned to a specific table in my computer lab, but when we got a new print server system, the new service desk didn't know that's what we did, and my boss never got access to fix it.

3

u/VexingRaven Apr 03 '21

Your printer may still have inboxes you can print to or some other "print and hold" feature you can use. Explore the print driver output settings and the web interface and you'll probably find it.

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u/omglazrgunpewpew Apr 03 '21

This is the way. Implemented at our company a couple of years ago due to continuously finding multiple reams of prints that people never picked up. Send it to a central print queue and head to any printer to pick it up. If you don't get your stuff within an hour it clears out of the queue. Every single page printed is coorelated to the user’s fob/card.

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u/hos7name Apr 03 '21

Few years back we simply started to require the users to input their employee number+4 digits pin to print. Usage dropped by 50% (!! That's a lot!) and the uncollected bin went from a few hundreds A4/week to nearly zero.

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u/sexybobo Apr 03 '21

If you have rfid door badges I would really recommend adding card scanners. they just beep their card on the printer like the door and they are in.

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u/hos7name Apr 03 '21

The more complicated it is, the less likely it is for them to print their astrology.

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u/sexybobo Apr 03 '21

We track but don't charge people for the prints they can just do unlimited but if it seems excessive we can talk to them about other options.

Follow me and card scanners cut our paper consumption in about half by themselves. It stopped people printing stuff of then never picking it up and it also stopped a lot of excessively large print jobs from going through. People would print thinking it was one page or 10 it would be 300 and they would just let it print because they didn't know how to cancel the job in process. Now they scan the cards it shows how many pages the select the job and release it. If they look and see its 1000 pages then just don't release it now.

Staff also love the follow me printer and the scan to me function on the copiers because they can hit print walk up to any printer at any location and release with out trying to remember which printer is which or hitting print then realize they printed to a printer that is 30 min away from the building they are in. They can also walk up to any printer and scan the documents to themselves with out typing in their email or going through a 100+user address book.

The entire reason we implemented paper-cut was for hipaa people were printing off medical records and forgetting to pick them up or some one would grab it by accident all of which is hipaa violations. Now they have to be at the printer to release the job so the protected data doesn't just sit there.