The week our office printer started printing gibberish nonstop for 3 days

I work IT at a small office in Portland, about 40 people. Last Tuesday, the main printer just started spitting out pages of random symbols and half formed letters. Nothing we did stopped it. Replaced the toner, cleared the queue, even unplugged it overnight. Next morning it was worse. By Thursday we had a stack of about 500 nonsense pages piled up by the break room. Everyone started taking them home as weird art. My boss finally called a repair guy who said it was a corrupted firmware chip and charged us $250 to fix it. Has anyone else had a piece of office equipment go completely haywire like that for no clear reason?

2 comments

2 Comments

jason_fisher47d ago

500 pages sounds like a solid week of kindling for a bonfire honestly... I once had a scanner at my last job that would only send copies in reverse order no matter what we tried. We ended up just printing everything backwards and calling it "mystery sequence day" until the lease ran out.

patricia_king237d ago

3 days of nonstop gibberish? $250 for a firmware chip? That's insane. Ive seen printers do some weird stuff but a corrupted chip just completely taking over like that sounds like something out of a horror movie. 500 pages of nonsense art though thats kind of hilarious honestly. Glad your boss actually called someone instead of just letting it run forever like some places do. My old office had a copier that would randomly add a smiley face to every page it scanned and we never figured out why.