As an IT professional there is nothing worse than dealing with printers.  Nothing about them conforms to anything, they rarely work as advertised, and they are constantly challenging us to second guess their perennially cryptic communications.

The Xerox Phaser 3250 (D or DN makes no difference) is no exception.  The machine has a power switch and a Start/Stop button.  The Start/Stop button is the only button on the device.  There are two lights.  One is a green power light.  The other we’ll call a communications light.

In the manual (and on every Web page I could find) you will be told to hold the Start/Stop button down “for about 5 seconds”.  That’s nice.  Let me just deconstruct this for you.

There are four possible things which can be made to happen by holding that one button down for a little bit of time.  The communications light will alter its message to you in subtle ways.  I have brought in a team of archaeologists who promise me they will have those luxographics deciphered before the turn of the century.

They are sexy archaeologists and I’m ok with waiting.  You may have other plans.

In short the first thing to print is a marketing piece of crap which prints on two sides.  Then (I think) you can print a statistics report.  Maybe next comes the promised configuration page.  And finally somewhen you will print out a cleaning page of some sort.

You will notice that the light alters its rhythm as you hold it down.  I assume this is meant to communicate changes in what is coming.  Don’t ask me to guarantee the order in which they print.  Don’t whine to me that you printed the same wrong page out three times trying to get the timing correct.  Just keep trying and prove your persistence.

For additional concerns I refer you to the printer scenes from Office Space.

Good luck with that.