Why Printers Generate So Many Help Desk Tickets

Monday, 08:40, at Meridian Parts, a distributor of engine components with a warehouse behind the office. Dana runs a desk of three, and the queue already holds four tickets about printers. "Cannot print, urgent, lorry waiting" from the goods-out office. "Jammed AGAIN" from the same office, nine minutes later, from a different person. "The invoices have a grey stripe down them" from accounts. And one that just says "it printed on the wrong one", with no printer named, from a sales assistant who has since gone into a meeting. Dana's newest technician, Leon, reads them aloud and says what every technician has said at some point: "Why is it always the printers?"

It is a fair question with a real answer, and the answer is not a curse. A printer ticket is any ticket where the requester wanted a sheet of paper, or a scan of one, and did not get it. That holds whatever the underlying cause turns out to be. Printers generate more of those than any other device of their size because of what a printer is. It is one shared machine with moving parts and consumables that run out. It has a driver on every computer that uses it, and a network cable. All of it is used by people at the exact moment they need something in their hand. This article is part of our Printer Support series. And it is the one that explains the volume before the rest of the series sets about reducing it.

It covers the five ingredients that make a printer a ticket machine and the sixth ingredient, which is the person in a hurry. Next come the six categories a printer ticket falls into and how to own the joke while still counting honestly. Then it covers a printer ticket census worked through on a fictional desk and what the count tells you to do next. It finishes with a short war story and the census template to copy.

Five Ingredients, One Device

The first ingredient is that a printer is shared. A laptop has one user, who learns its habits and raises one ticket when it fails. A workgroup printer has forty users. When it fails, every one of them discovers it separately, in their own words, at their own moment of need. One fault becomes eight tickets, three walk-ups and a complaint in the kitchen. The desk closes them one by one while the cause is fixed once. Sharing multiplies the reporting of a fault without multiplying the fault.

The second ingredient is moving parts. Almost nothing else on an office desk has them any more. Screens, keyboards, docks and phones are solid state. They fail rarely and when they fail they stay failed, which is at least tidy. A printer has rollers that wear smooth, a paper path with doors and flaps, a fusing unit that runs hot, and trays that slide. It also has a feed mechanism that has to pick exactly one sheet from a stack of five hundred several thousand times a week. Mechanical things wear. Wear is gradual, so the fault arrives as an occasional jam long before it arrives as a dead printer. Every occasional jam is a ticket.

The third ingredient is consumables. Toner, ink, drums, waste containers, staples, and paper itself all run out, on a schedule set by how much people print rather than by anyone's plan. An "out of toner" ticket is not a technical fault at all. It is a stock problem that has reached the desk because the desk is where problems go. The desk did not cause it and often cannot fix it without a trip to a cupboard. And the cupboard is sometimes empty, which produces a second ticket about the first.

The fourth ingredient is the driver. A driver is the piece of software on each computer that translates a document into the language the printer speaks. And there is a copy of it on every machine that prints. Drivers get updated and get installed in two different ways on two neighbouring machines. They get left behind when a printer is replaced. They occasionally produce forty pages of symbols because they are speaking a language the printer does not understand. Every other shared device in the building has one configuration in one place. A printer has its configuration smeared across every computer that has ever connected to it.

The fifth ingredient is the network. A printer is a small computer with an address of its own. It goes to sleep, wakes up, forgets things, and gets a new address when somebody changes the network. It sits at the end of a cable that cleaners and desk-movers treat as optional. None of that is the printer's fault, exactly. It is simply exposed to every layer of the building at once: the physical, the electrical, the network and the software. A fault at any layer looks, from the user's chair, exactly the same. It did not print.

The Sixth Ingredient: People in a Hurry

The sixth ingredient is not in the printer; it is standing in front of it. People print at the moment of need, which is to say at the last possible moment. The pick list for the lorry that is already reversing in. The contract for the client who is already in reception. The boarding pass, the statement, the form the nurse needs signed before the ward round. Nobody prints a document on Tuesday for a meeting on Thursday, and so a printer fault is never discovered calmly. It is discovered with somebody waiting.

That shapes the tickets. A printer ticket arrives hot, short, and missing every fact the desk needs. Which printer, what the screen on the printer says, whether anyone else can print, and what was being printed are all missing. "Printer broken" is a complete ticket to the person who typed it, because they are standing next to the printer and can see everything. The desk, two floors away, can see nothing. The articles on gathering the right information up front apply with special force here. The later articles in this series give the two questions that turn "printer broken" into a diagnosis.

The hurry also means that people fix things themselves, badly, before they raise the ticket. They pull a jammed sheet out backwards and leave a torn corner inside the fuser. They switch the printer off and on four times. They print the same document again from the other application, then from a colleague's machine. So when the printer finally wakes up it produces the job six times. Then they raise the ticket, which now describes a printer that is "printing random pages". None of this is stupidity, and a desk that treats it as stupidity has misunderstood the sixth ingredient. It is what anyone does with a lorry waiting.

The Six Categories

Nearly every printer ticket falls into one of six categories, and sorting them is the first step in understanding your own queue. The categories are by symptom, because that is what the requester reports. The cause behind each symptom varies, and finding it is the job of the print triage flow in the next article. The table below gives each category, the words it arrives in, what it usually turns out to be, and which article in this series owns the fix.

The sixth category is not a symptom, and it earns its place anyway. On most desks one device generates a disproportionate share of every other category. It is usually the one nearest the door, the kitchen or the biggest team. It does a disproportionate share of the printing and is in a place where people pass it with wet umbrellas. It is worth counting on its own from the start. The fix for "the one by the door" is often not a fix at all but a decision about where printers go. That is the subject of standardising the fleet.

Scanning deserves a note because it is the category desks forget. A multifunction printer that scans to e-mail or to a shared folder is, for that purpose, a small computer. It has an account on the mail service and a password that expires like everyone else's. When the password expires or the folder moves, the printer stops scanning with no message at all. In that case, the ticket says "the printer is broken" when the printer is fine. Count scanning as a printer ticket, because the requester does, and because the fix lives with whoever looks after the device's accounts.

Owning the Joke While Counting Honestly

Every desk has printer jokes, and I am not going to tell you to stop. The printer that only jams for the finance team. The one that has been replaced twice and the replacement jams too, which has led to a theory about the floor. The ticket that says "the printer is making a noise like it is thinking about something". Shared frustration is how a small team stays sane, and a printer is the one device everyone in the building is allowed to be cross with, including the desk.

The joke has two rules. The first is that it is never at the requester's expense, in the ticket, in the reply, or in the kitchen where the requester might be. The person who printed the pick list six times had a lorry waiting. The person who called the printer "the main one" did not know it had a name because nobody had given it one. The target of a printer joke is the printer, the paper, the building, the industry that still makes us print things, and, on honest days, the desk's own past decisions. Never the person who needed a piece of paper and did not get one.

The second rule is that the joke must not do the counting. A desk that says "it's always the printers" with a sigh has an opinion. A desk that says "printers were one ticket in eight last quarter, and one device was a third of those" has a decision. The two sound similar in the kitchen and are completely different in a budget meeting. The folklore says the second-floor printer is cursed. The count says it is a specific device, with a specific number of tickets, costing a specific number of hours. And that is a sentence that can end with "so we are replacing it". Folklore has never once got a printer replaced.

Counting honestly also means counting the tickets that never became tickets. Printer problems are the walk-up's natural home. There is "can you just come and look at it" on the way past. There is the toner changed by whoever was nearest, and the jam cleared by the technician who happened to be on that floor. Every one of those is a printer ticket that the count will miss unless it is logged, even as a one-liner afterwards. The ways an unlogged walk-up corrupts every number a desk keeps are in How Support Quietly Fails. Log the corridor. The printer certainly will not.

A Printer Ticket Census, Worked Through

A printer ticket census is a one-off count of every printer ticket over a period, cut by category, by device, by time and by requesting team. It is done to find out what the printer problem actually is before anyone tries to fix it. It takes an afternoon from a ticket export and a spreadsheet. It needs nothing the desk does not already have. And it is the single most useful afternoon in this series. Every later article depends on knowing which of the six categories and which devices are carrying the load. Here is Dana's, done at Meridian Parts over one quarter, with every number invented for the example and none of them a benchmark for your desk.

The desk had closed 611 tickets in the quarter. Dana searched the subject lines and the resolution notes for "print", "printer", "jam", "toner", "scan" and the names of the devices. That found 69 tickets. She then skimmed the rest for anything she had missed. That found 5 more filed under the requesting team's name with no mention of a printer in the subject. Seventy-four tickets, roughly one in eight, which was more than the desk's folklore had guessed and less than Leon had feared. Counting properly, as the article on counting tickets properly explains, is mostly a matter of deciding what counts before you start.

By category, cannot print was the largest at 31, then jams at 17, wrong output at 11, print quality at 7, and scanning at 6. There were 2 that fitted nowhere (a request to move a printer and a question about whether colour was allowed). By device, the picture was sharper: the goods-out office printer had 29 of the 74, and the accounts printer had 12. The remaining 33 were spread across nine other devices, none of which had more than 5. By time, 40 of the 74 arrived before ten in the morning. That is when the warehouse builds the day's loads and accounts runs the previous day's invoices. By team, goods-out and accounts raised 51 between them.

Then the hours. Dana took the time each ticket had spent being worked. Her tool recorded it, and a spreadsheet of start and close times approximates it badly. She found that the 74 tickets had cost somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five hours of technician time over the quarter. The goods-out printer alone took roughly a third of that once the walks across the yard were included. Her desk of three had around a thousand working hours in the quarter between them, so printers were somewhere around one hour in thirty-five. Not a crisis. Not nothing, either, and concentrated enough that a single change might move it.

Notice what the census did not tell her. It did not say whether one hour in thirty-five is good or bad, because there is no number from someone else's desk that would make it so. The only useful comparison is with Meridian Parts next quarter. It did not say why the goods-out printer failed, only that it did, often. And it did not count the time the warehouse staff spent waiting, printing twice, or walking to accounts to use their printer instead. That time was certainly larger than the desk's own hours, and nobody had recorded it anywhere. The census measures the desk's side of the cost. The other side is bigger and invisible, and worth saying so when the count is presented.

What the Count Tells You to Do

The census is a map, and the shape of the count points at the article to read next. If "cannot print" dominates and it is spread across many devices, the problem is in the layers between the user and the paper. In that case, the fixes are the triage flow for the desk and drivers, queues and defaults done once for the infrastructure. If jams and quality dominate on one or two devices, the problem is physical and local, and the physical article owns it. If the tickets are spread thinly across a long list of different models, the desk is paying for variety, and the fleet standard is where the hours are. If one device is a third of everything, as at Meridian Parts, the first question is not how to fix it but whether to keep it. That is the measuring article's subject.

The decision table below is the short version. It is a starting point, not a verdict. Most desks find two of the rows apply at once. The order to tackle them in is usually the one that touches the fewest machines first. A fix on the server is one change; a fix on every desktop is forty.

One thing the census changes immediately, before any article is read, is the form. Dana added two questions to the request form for printing problems: which printer, from the label on the front, and what the printer's own screen says. The answer to the second question alone resolved a quarter of the next month's "cannot print" tickets in the first reply. That is because "it says load paper in tray two" is not a technical fault. If you run QuerySolv, a department can have its own form. In that case, a short printing form with those two questions can sit beside the general one without cluttering it for everyone else. In any tool, the principle is the same: ask for the label and the screen message, and ask for nothing else.

A Short War Story: The Printer Nobody Counted at Ashgrove Housing

At Ashgrove Housing, a social landlord, housing officers printed tenancy letters, notices and inspection forms all day. The desk had believed for years that printers were "a few tickets a week". It had treated the lettings office printer as a running joke with a name. A new technician called Tom, bored one Friday, counted the previous year and found that printers were one ticket in seven. The lettings office device alone had taken two in five of those. It had been repaired five times under a service contract whose engineer the lettings team greeted by first name. Tom added up the desk's hours on that one device and reached a little over ninety for the year. That did not count the lettings officers' own time printing in the next office. The device was replaced within a fortnight of the count reaching the operations manager. That was the first time the request had been made with a number attached rather than a sigh. The lesson Tom's manager wrote in the team notes was short: the joke had hidden the number. The number was a decision nobody had been able to take while it was a joke.

The Printer Ticket Census

The template below is Dana's census, cleaned up for reuse. Fill it in from a ticket export over one quarter. A month is too short for the pattern to show on a small desk, and a year is too long to act on. Section A is the headline count. B is the cut by category. C is the cut by device, which is the one that drives decisions. D is the cuts by time and by team. E is the hours. F is what you intend to do about it, with a name and a date against each line. Keep the finished sheet; the measuring article turns this one-off census into a standing quarterly scorecard. And the first census is the baseline every later one is compared against.

PRINTER TICKET CENSUS — ONE QUARTER
Desk: ______________________   Period: ____________ to ____________   Counted by: ______________

A. HEADLINE
   Tickets closed in the period, all kinds ........... ______
   Printer tickets found by search ................... ______   (terms used: print, printer, jam, toner, scan, device names)
   Printer tickets found by skim ..................... ______
   Printer tickets, total ............................ ______   Share of all tickets: about one in ______
   Walk-ups and corridor fixes logged after the fact . ______   (if none, say so; the count is low by that much)

B. BY CATEGORY
   Cannot print ..... ______     The jam .......... ______     Print quality .... ______
   Wrong output ..... ______     Scanning ......... ______     Other ............ ______

C. BY DEVICE (every printer, busiest first; add rows as needed)
   Label ______________  Location ______________  Tickets ______  Largest category ______________
   Label ______________  Location ______________  Tickets ______  Largest category ______________
   Label ______________  Location ______________  Tickets ______  Largest category ______________
   Label ______________  Location ______________  Tickets ______  Largest category ______________
   Devices with no tickets at all: ______ of ______

D. BY TIME AND BY TEAM
   Before 10:00 ______   10:00 to 14:00 ______   After 14:00 ______   Busiest weekday: ______________
   Team raising most: ______________ (______)   Second: ______________ (______)

E. THE HOURS
   Technician time on printer tickets, low estimate ______ h   high estimate ______ h
   Walking time included: yes / no          Largest single device: ______________ about ______ h
   Desk's working hours in the period, all staff ...... ______ h   Printers: about one hour in ______

F. WHAT THIS POINTS AT (one line each, with an owner and a date)
   First action: ___________________________________________  Owner: __________  By: ________
   Second action: __________________________________________  Owner: __________  By: ________
   Device to review for keep / move / retire: ______________  Owner: __________  By: ________
   Form change (label and screen message asked for): done / not yet

Dana's first action was the goods-out printer. It turned out to be fed from a paper cupboard beside the loading-bay door and to have rollers polished smooth by a year of damp paper. That is a story the physical article tells properly. Her second was central queues, so that the twelve machines in accounts stopped keeping twelve private arrangements with one printer. Leon's question got its answer on the census sheet, and it was not "because printers are cursed". It was "because one device by a loading bay is doing a third of the work with the wrong paper", which is a sentence with a fix in it.

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