The Machines Are Alive

I swear the more processors and memory we put into our computers, the more likely the are to come to life, if they haven't already. Processing power has grown so fast that most PC's can handle workloads that weren't even imaginable ten years ago. Just the other day I had my computer at home ripping a DVD, converting videos to another format, uploading a data backup file, recording live TV, using VoIP, streaming video my Xbox 360, and playing a video game -- all at the same time, without even so much as a hiccup.

With all this new computing power at our fingertips, I'm amazing our computers haven't started talking back to us yet. Then again, that's likely a software issue. But I am willing to say that I've seen some technology start to take on personal attitudes, if only at a base level. Where I work, the developers all share a common network enabled printer. It gets used fairly regularly by all of us. After a few weeks we've all started to notice that our printer seems to have something against one of the developers, and against him only. In the year or so that I've been there, I've yet to have a problem with that printer. Every time I use it, it works flawlessly. The same goes for almost all the developers, except this one guy. For him, the printer likes to give a 'Paper Jam' error message on a large percentage of his printouts. When you check the printer, there is no paper jam. You just open one of the trays and close it again and all is fine.

The last few weeks we've tracked how often this happens. For all the other developers we get that error about one in fifty. For the unfortunate guy, he gets it about four in five printouts. It doesn't matter what time of day, how many pages, what tray he prints from, or from what PC he initializes his printouts, it always seems to give that bogus error message for him and him alone. Every time it happens we can all hear his verbal frustrations and almost on cue, the entire development team bursts out laughing. If the printer doesn't learn it's place, it may find itself in the same position that unfortunate printer did in the movie Office Space.