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Why So Hard?

Entry 2427, on 2026-01-22 at 11:59:22 (Rating 2, Computers)

I work in IT and often have to help people who have run into issues with their computers, phones, and other devices. Sometimes the people I am helping sort of apologise for not being able to resolve the issue themselves, and it is true that sometimes if they just read the screen, slowed down a little bit, and put a bit of thought into it, they could have fixed it themselves, but more often there is something genuinely weird happening which is not their fault.

If you use a computer you have probably noticed that things don't always work as advertised, and that the suggested solutions sometimes make things worse rather than better, and that an expert is needed to make any progress. Also, the solution is often to restart the device, log out then log back into a service, or wait an hour and try again. Do those solutions sound like they are really fixing the underlying issue or just temporarily disguising it? To me, it sounds a lot like the second.

In fact I don't like restarting a computer to fix a problem because that is not a permanent fix, it is just resetting stuff to a previous state which could easily result in the problem returning. That's not to say I don't use that method some times, but when I do I don't like it!

So now is the time to list a few recent examples of this phenomenon...

A client recently bought a new printer and was told by the staff at the shop some sort of convoluted story about using a smart phone to set it up. When he tried to do the setup he got nowhere because the instructions didn't appear to have any connection with the actual printer he had (a Brother in this example, which are usually quite good). He thought maybe the instructions were for a different model entirely.

When I looked at it I could see that the instructions did apply to his model, so I followed them carefully to try to get the printer working. But did it work? By now you have probably figured that the answer is "no"!

I should clarify the situation here, and say that this was to get wireless printing set up. Normal printing through a cable on a Mac is usually very easy and reliable, but some wireless printers are not so simple.

In the end I just threw away the instructions and used my experience and intuition to install everything "the hard way". This involved steps like entering passwords by selecting letters in a grid using up, down, left, right keys, and other frustrations, but in the end it did work and seems to be reliable.

A couple of months back I had another wireless printer issue which, despite many calls to the manufacturer (Canon in this case), was never resolved. The client had to give that printer away and we bought an HP instead, which worked after only one weird glitch: a miracle for a printer!

It's not just me either: an IT geeks group I follow on Facebook often has posts making fun of problems with printers. A favourite joke is that the band "Rage Against the Machine" was named that after a particularly bad experience trying to get a printer to work!

I have several wireless printers at home even though I almost never print anything. In fact, you could say I use paper a negative number of times, because if someone gives me some information on paper I take a photo of it with my phone, store it as a file on my computer - and in iCloud so it is accessible from all my devices - and hand them the paper back again.

I don't use paper for various reasons: first, I don't want more trees killed just to store information in an archaic way (on paper); second, I can store the equivalent of millions of pieces of paper even on small devices like my phone; third, searching on a digital device takes seconds but a manual search for paper might take hours; and finally, I just want to show that the "paperless office" we were supposed to have decades ago is actually possible.

But sometimes I might want to print a poster, or a photo, so the printers do exist. Also my wife likes to print stuff, just like a lot of people do, and that's fair enough: I have given up trying to convert people to a paperless system like I have. My printers are connected to a print server, so the server does the connection to the printer through a cable and the computers wanting to print communicate with the server wirelessly. This is more or less 100% reliable, although I do realise that most people don't want half a dozen servers of various types cluttering up their house like I have!

This post was going to be a rant about IT problems in general but it seems to have degenerated into a whinging session just about printers. Maybe I will leave the complaining about other issues for a later date. All I want to ask the printer manufacturers at this point is this: why so hard?

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