That Printer Hates Us

TRUE STORY:

One time I walked into the tek room and Steve ran up and said “Scott! I’m glad you’re here! I have to show this to someone!!”

And he then proceeded to walk me through the entire event. He came into the tek room, sat down at his computer and tried to print something. The computer gave him some error message that made him get up and look at the printer, which had this message displayed on the little LED screen:

!!!!FUCK YOU!!!!

Notice the FOUR (4) exclamation points on EACH SIDE of the message to add emphasis.

At this point he walked me over to the printer, and there the message was, blinking happily at us. We both laughed our asses off.

You have to understand that to the best of my (and Steve’s) knowledge, there was no way to make the printer say this. I think those printer messages are stored on a little ROM chip, so you can’t edit them.

Once we stopped laughing, we decided that we had to document this, or no one would believe the story. So we ran down to the equipment check-out desk and got a digital camera for a few minutes. We took the photo and showed it to everyone, and got mouse pads printed with the message (it’s free at our school, for some reason).

It didn’t occur to us at the time that with a digital image, everyone’s first reaction was that we had doctored it, or that there was some program out there, which we found out later was true. Still,

:: hatelife is your printer swearing at you ::