The 'Ow My Printer' Saga: Good News and Bad News

Posted on Friday, January 01, 2010 | | In

Well, actually it's not much of a saga, because it's over. I fixed the printer tonight. I opened it up to see why that paper was jammed in there and I discovered the problem.

The good news: I removed the blockage.

The bad news: The blockage was three CDs.

Naturally the top CD, the one which now sports a pair of gouges in its surface from having been dragged and dug into by the printer's drive wheels (I don't know if they're called that, but you know what I mean), was the store-bought music disc. The other two were an Xubuntu disc that had started spouting data read errors and an unknown (probably a weirdly-functioning GPartEd) disc. Ninety-nine percent certain I had ripped the music CD.

Why were there CDs in my printer, you ask? I remember having set those discs in the printer tray because I didn't want to forget about them. I don't remember starting a print job with the discs still in the tray, though the last time I tried to print I was in a bit of a hurry and may not have noticed the discs having perhaps slid deeper into the paper tray.

The moral of the story is: don't put CDs in your printer tray. At least the printer still prints.


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