I have been given a few bad jobs in my time and to be fair most of them involved cleaning things out in one way or another.
For example, in my very first job I was given the weekly duty to sort out the office drinks machine. If you can recall those 1970s style coffee making machines then you will probably sympathise with me. The inside of it was pretty horrible and the first time I opened it up put me off the idea of instant hot drinks for months.
It dispensed the classics like tea, coffee and hot chocolate but also had a surprisingly modern touch with a relatively tasty tomato soup. I don’t think cappuccino, mocha or strawberry frapuccinos existed back in those days, at least not in my home town. Anyway, I hated cleaning out the grunge, the gunk and the other weird stuff which built up in it.
After that I moved onto looking after the maintenance of the office printers. This was a big job and fairly messy as well. I had to clean the HP 1200 LaserJet Toner, it’s fair to say after completing the job I was covered in a cloud of toner, very difficult to get out of your clothes.
A Coat Hanger Salvage Device
My main job was to open it up and clean out the paper which had gotten jammed in it. Did this happen often? Oh, about as often as the drinks machine running out of tomato soup on cold winter days. I had to use an old bent clothes hanger to try and get offending pieces of paper out. Actually, thinking about it now I don’t even know where that coat hanger came from or who came up with the idea of using it as a jammed paper salvage device.
The other job which I had to do with the printer was change the toner cartridges when it had run out. If I am being honest I didn’t even know what I was really doing at the start and ended up with powdered ink all over my shirt the first time. I got a bit better at it over time but it all seemed so unnecessarily complicated that I need to confess now that I sometimes skipped doing it and nipped out for lunch in the hope that a colleague would need to change it in my absence.
All of this reminiscing has a point, and that it is that it was brought on by seeing how easy it is to clean the toners on modern printers. A friend had advised me that doing this would help extend the machine’s life. I was a bit reluctant to do it at first as the mere idea brought back some nasty memories. Anyway, I started to do it and realised that it has actually allowed my printer to give me a better performance as well as stay in tip top condition for longer.
Recent Comments