The Trained Versus The Untrained

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

One of the Printers started crinkling the edge of almost every sheet of paper that came out of the main hopper. The repairman showed up, looked at the damage, and noting that there was some toner on the edges of the sheets that were crinkled, decided that the problem was in the finisher near the top. He spent a certain amount of time and effort trying fix the problem, but was rushed because he had a business meeting at his office.

As he was explaining what he had done and how this had not fixed the problem, I reminded him that the problem had started in the lower tray, which had had a feed problem that had been fixed the day before. That it seemed to me that the this simply indicated that the previous problem had not been fully fixed. After a moment, he ran a test sheet from the #1 tray, which came out pristine. He then realized that the toner was not a sign of the problem, but that the crinkled sheets were stripping off toner as they passed due to being higher (where they were crinkled) than a flat sheet.

Sometimes the problem is more obvious to the untrained observer than it is to the trained repairman.

The Printer has now been fixed.