A few weeks ago I got an e-mail from a manager in my company. He wanted to know the status of a printer he bought for our office. I heard the thing was dead. So that is what I reported to the manager. This seems to infuriate him as he thought the thing had been in use during the past year. Now it was my job to get the thing running.Here is the problem. I am the senior guy on my project. That means I deal with a lot of emergencies from the customer. This keep me at work for long hours every day. How can I make time to get a broke down printer working? I like to apply balance to everything. And I also count the costs of choosing different tasks over each other. After a while I was spending too much time explaining why the printer was still not working to the manager. Thus I made it a priority to fix it.
I went to the local computer store to get some parts. Then I found some documentation online on how to setup and debug the printer. Doing these chores meant that I had to skip some meetings where I normally provide all the information. Let's just say those meetings did not go well today. I had a good excuse though. A high level manager wanted his this printer up and running. Finding the printers drivers was not that hard. It was tricky to figure out which things I needed to rip out of the printer to ensure prints went through fine. This is just part of the drudgery of being a developer. People assume you can do sys admin or help desk work. Since I am technical, at least I can. The printer is printing fine now.
