My printer's user guide? I’m sure I had it here somewhere…
Evil computers sense you’re in a hurry and mess with your head
There, finished. Save aaaaaaand… Print.
Error 51: Consult service manual.
Error 51? Is that supposed to be a joke? I mean, it sounds like a bad pun on ‘Area 51’. Oh, those wacky error-message coders on the firmware development team, they kill me, they really do. Let’s try again.
Print.
Error 51: Consult service manual.
Come on, come on, don’t give me that. There’s nothing wrong with my laser printer, least of all an ‘Error 51’ that, by definition, even the service manual admits is less likely than 50 much more credible potential errors. Besides, I used the printer earlier and it worked fine. It isn’t now.
Print, you dick.
Error 51: Consult service manual.
What service manual? When I bought the printer, I think it came with one of those ‘Quick-start’ leaflets. I noticed it among the various other flimsy sheets of bumf that I chucked straight into the recycling, such as notices telling me not to plunge my printer into the bath and a stern warning that a kitten would die every time I used a third-party toner cartridge. I don’t remember seeing anything with more than four pages, let alone a publication that might resemble a service manual.
If I was in a client’s office, I might log a call with IT support and ask them if they had the service manual to consult on my behalf. But they’d just ask whether I had tried switching it off and back on again. And then I’d ask them in return if they’d tried shoving their smartphone up their arse and squeezing it back out. A brief moment of silence would follow, then I’d confirm yes, of course I’ve played the restart game; even with a two-minute power-down with all cables removed.
The thing is, I am in my own office and I can barely spare that two minutes. I’m in a desperate hurry and I have to get this stuff printed so I can run for a train. And you know what? This bastard printer knows I’m in a hurry. That’s why it’s doing this. It wants me to be late. Bastard. Bastard. Bastard.
Apologies… When things don’t work when they should be working and have absolutely no reason not to, I get a bit upset. The usual soundtrack to my life that plays sweetly in my head as I go about my daily business – it’s the theme from Katamari Damarcy, in case you’re interested – gets replaced by, well, any track by Archspire.
Why I choose to put my livelihood at the mercy of electronic machines is anyone’s guess. I must be a fool.
Years ago, I interviewed a nice man who specialised in coloured glass and he spent his days travelling the country, restoring stained-glass windows in churches. He left me aghast by saying that he was ditching that lifestyle now that he had bought a computer and from this moment on he planned to develop a career in designing atria for poncy city centre office blocks.
Can you imagine what it must be like to earn a decent living being paid to conserve art, by the honest toil of your own hands, using your unique craft and completed at your own pace, for clients who will always, without exception, be overjoyed with the results every time? Now compare this to giving it all up to fiddle about on an unreliable laptop and dealing with flaky, squealing, knobhead clients in the city who will pretend to be disappointed with your work so they can delay payment for 18 months.
Sure, slaving over stained glass in a damp Gothic stone hut in a provincial village lacks the thrill of designing an atrium over the swollen heads of rich bankers. But you can probably restore a church window without your hammer locking up, your chisel crashing, your china-marker requiring an inconvenient scheduled update or your glass-cutting tools producing incomprehensible error messages.
Indeed, you ought to be be able to restore splendour to that church handsomely without having a team of deadheads dancing forever around behind you, barking orders, changing their minds every three seconds and insisting that you must shave five days from your deadline because “God needs the window finished by Friday”.
Print.
Error 51: Consult service manual.
A new thought occurs to me: could this be the beginning of an onslaught of device failures? Things never go wrong in isolation. Given the opportunity, all the little electronic buggers around the house will start playing up for the sheer fun of it. If you are of a certain age, you may remember an era in which incandescent light bulbs around your home would pop, one after the other, over the course of a few days. They did it purely to annoy you. The only way to get it to stop, I found, was to fetch a hammer from the shed and swagger about the house, screaming at the lightbulbs that I’d smash every single fucking one of them if they didn’t stop messing about. That usually did the trick.
So naturally I am apprehensive this time too. I glance around the room to check if LEDs are still blinking. I sniff the air for that tell-tale fishy scent of burning plastic. I listen intently for electrical fizzing.
There was one particularly bad two weeks in our old home back in the south-east of the land of angels in which practically every machine, gadget and domestic installation throughout the house relentlessly began breaking down. In the space of a fortnight, things regressed from a state of relative normality to one in which I could no longer cook in my own kitchen, piss in my own toilet or indeed, like now, print from my own printer.
Particularly galling on that occasion was that the many and various workmen who I hired to help me fix things also broke down one after another.
I’m pretty sure the gas engineer converted my suddenly unreliable cooker hob into an even more suddenly and completely broken one by clumsily trying to fix it with a huge wrench that he borrowed off that bloke in the Go West video in the 1980s – to which I just (heh) closed my eyes.
As for the plumber, he tried to correct a slow drip by dismantling the toilet entirely. As he did so, he muttered to himself continuously, before going full Jack Torrance by apparently holding conversations with the various toilet parts he had scattered about the floor. “You are the plumber,” they told him. “You have always been the plumber.” He eventually gave up and shouted “I’ll let you know if I get the right washer!” as he buggered off out the door, leaving the dismantled bog as it was.
Given how many days I had wasted awaiting a whole series of jokingly titled “engineers” to turn up in order to fail to do any appreciable work whatsoever – unless by “work” you mean “harm” – there’s no way that I would bother calling in a support technician to cock up my printer as well. I’d rather buy a new one. Besides, if my toilet breaks down again, I could use the old printer to shit in.
Print, scan, copy, fax and shit. Now that’s multifunctional.
Now, where was I? Ah yes. Print.
Error 51: Consult service manual.
Let’s see what happens if I try to print from Mme D’s laptop… ah, it says it can’t find the printer. Like the aforementioned plumber, I have already begun talking to broken things: I have been shouting at my printer “Print, you stupid bastard!” Now I find myself berating my wife’s laptop too. “What do you mean you can’t find the printer?” I scream, pointing to the far corner of the room. “Look, it’s over there, dickhead, OVER THERE!”
The cat has wandered into my office to see what I am doing. She looks up at me. She looks at the printer. She glances at me again, then leaves in order to return to rip the silk curtains to shreds. Oh, how I wish I was a stained-glass craftsman. Or my cat.
Print.
Error 51: Consult service manual.
You know, this printer has an attitude problem. If it doesn’t buck up its ideas, I’m going to open the window and it’ll have an altitude problem – on its way to the hard pavement. I am convinced that the printer knows I don’t have a service manual and I suspect ‘Error 51’ is just something it made up to annoy me. Only a service engineer with a copy of the manual would know for sure.
Come to think of it… By reporting an error message that only an engineer will understand and by referring to a service manual that only the engineer has access to, my printer is effectively talking behind my back. No, it’s more blatant than that: it’s dispensed with any pretence of printsplaining and is trying to speak to someone else over my shoulder. It is bypassing the thicko in front of it to talk to a technician it deems more worthy of its tender attentions. It’s like the comedy Nigel Farage impersonator on BBC Radio 4’s Dead Ringers when he interrupts a female voiceover by saying: “All right love, pipe down, the men are talking.”
Drastic measures are in order: I unplug everything connected to the office and, my plans to catch the train now abandoned, storm off to the living room in order to SMS today’s client with excuses and apologies while watching what I thought was a documentary investigating the downside of modern tech but turns out to be a dystopian Liu Cixin sci-fi movie instead. (I thought there too many explosions, even for Newsnight.)
An hour later, all the machines are back on again and the printer sulkily agrees to print my documents after all. I can tell it’s in a sulk because, even though it is printing again, it does so while flashing up the occasional ‘low toner’ message.
My print job hangs halfway.
Error 51: Consult service manual.
Then my computer loses its internet connection. Mme D’s laptop is perfectly happy, though. I turn back to my computer and call it names. I then notice that some of the blinking lights under my desk are not blinking as they should be. Is it my Ethernet cabling’s turn to be an arse?
After swapping the cables between ports in every conceivable permutation, and swapping out some of the cables entirely, I accept defeat and enable Wi-Fi on all devices. Then I calmly unplug the Ethernet switch from the mains… and kick the fucking thing out of my office, down the fucking hall, through the fucking kitchen and into the fucking cellar for fucking refuckingcycling.
I hope the printer was watching.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. While he was in the cellar, he found the printer’s service manual. Apparently ‘Error 51’ indicates an Ethernet connection problem. He wonders why the on-screen message could not have read ‘Ethernet connection problem’ instead of ‘Error 51’ as it would have been more helpful. But where would the fun be in that?
So you triggered the critical needs sensor and discovered that using Mme D’s laptop only revealed that they are all in the same Union.
You've no idea how appropriate that was to my day today. Many virtual beers heading south in your direction. J'y vais au bar ! Cheers.