Last week, I was getting down and dirty with the tax preparation courses and practice sessions. I would print out the assessment scenarios and then manually prepare the requisite forms (in pencil, of course, cos I could erase the figures and use the same form for the next scenario). But anyway, I am mindful of paper waste and so I ALWAYS print duplexed. All of a sudden, on Thursday night, the printer stopped duplexing. The print queue on my iMac would say “Opening printer connection …” and then it would say a couple of seconds later “Printer Connection Failed: Unable to open the printer connection. Please check your printer connections and check for printer errors.” The printer itself would have no errors, it would just be sitting there, looking all innocent and stuff … like it hadn’t even HEARD that it was supposed to be printing something… the print queue would have this huge glaring error …. Even more innocent looking when we send single pages to it and it prints, but looking away whistling when we tell it to duplex.
So, as usual, I dig into the logs. I fire up the Macs native log browser and see some errors that make me cringe “[Job 93] can’t open `/private/var/spool/cups/tmp/496ffa9500870′.” … and other similar messages. Ooooh boy. Of course, I am tired by this time cos I’ve been doing this literally ALL DAY. And I haven’t stopped once. So I sit back and sigh. Hubby is beside himself because he knows this is not something he can cheer me up about. I sit back and a light bulb goes off “Fix perms!” it says. And I obey. I don’t even run a check perms in disk utility first, I just run a fix perms because that last error indicated to me there was a permissions problem .. maybe.
Well, it wasn’t. When I attempted the print again after the “Repair Permissions” in Disk Utility, I got the same set of errors. So I go LOOKING for these culprit files that the OS is claiming it cannot open … and lo and behold, it’s not that the file is there and has permissions that would preclude it from being opened … oh no. The file named in the error message isn’t there AT ALL.
Of course, you know, at this point, I just throw my hands in the air and go to bed – right? That I did – but not before submitting a support request to HP for the problem – explaining ALL the things we did to “fix” this error.
So anyway, they responded maybe yesterday of Friday with a question about how the printer is connected – whether via USB or network (Ethernet) and I didn’t even bother to respond because I was so tired and just needed to sleep. I responded this morning though and while I am sitting there pondering the weird situation again, what do I do? I try to duplex print … and guess what? The damn printer duplex printed!
So I am sitting here and the most logical conclusion I can come to about this stupid printer is that … IT was tired why it refused to print. Well, either that, or we need to get it to a psychologist … cos it’s developed schizophrenic tendencies.
/sigh
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