A Call For Humor!

[HedgeHog]

View attachment 484737

It tosses itself.

 

[Waxx]

 

[Waxx]

 

[Waxx]

on a Belgian flea market:

 

[respice finem]

Maybe they have the same attitude as some people in Poland had decades ago: My great-grandfather had bought himself a coffin at age 70, to avoid trouble for the family when he would die. Then he died - at age 106, and the coffin, stored in a shed, was completely useless (eaten up by woodworms).

 

[xray]

Maybe they have the same attitude as some people in Poland had decades ago: My great-grandfather had bought himself a coffin at age 70, to avoid trouble for the family when he would die. Then he died - at age 106, and the coffin, stored in a shed, was completely useless (eaten up by woodworms).

We should all have such "bad" luck to outlive our coffin

 

[respice finem]

We should all have such "bad" luck to outlive our coffin

As long as we stay healthy enough to enjoy it, which is rarely the case, alas...

 

[Waxx]

Another Belgian fix, here in the docks (old harbor) of Ghent.

 

[Keith_W]

 

[Martin]

Martin

 

[A Cute Earring]

Rolodex

Tractor feed

 

[Neddy]

Years ago a friend of mine (RIP) serviced IBM(?) line printers, and told the story of one feed failure he had to fix that would FILL the entire room it was in with paper in about 1 second. He said it was one of the most frightening experiences he'd had, and that was after serving in Vietnam in the 60s.

 

[Buckaroo Shanzai]

"Fvck. Russian drones."

 

[Berwhale]

Years ago a friend of mine (RIP) serviced IBM(?) line printers, and told the story of one feed failure he had to fix that would FILL the entire room it was in with paper in about 1 second. He said it was one of the most frightening experiences he'd had, and that was after serving in Vietnam in the 60s.

This reminds me of another printer related calamity...

Thirty-odd years ago, I worked for a well known American charge card and travel company. All of the door security systems in the UK were run from a single IBM RS/6000 in the main security control room. For some reason, they had to keep a hard copy record when a contractor went through a security door, so a dot matrix printer was attached directly to the RS/6000 which would print a line recording each event.

Occasionally the printer would jam, so there was a ring binder with instruction for the on-shift security guard to fix the issue. The instructions went roughly like this...

1. Fix the paper jam.
2. Log on to the RS/6000 as 'root'
3. Change directory to the print spool directory.
4. Type rm *.*

Some of you may be ahead of me now. But for the rest of you...

One night, when I happened to be on-call, a security guard managed to bungle #3 and ended up running rm *.* in the root of the file system. This fatally wounded the RS/6000 and broke the doors in all 17 offices in the UK. This included the EMEA headquarters which had around 4,000 people working there (including me) and many doors!

I was NOT an RS/6000 specialist - although i'd had some AIX training and was a certified 'expert' for their PC servers - so I quickly escalated to my boss who learned her trade running RS/6000s for the Royal Navy. It took my boss over 12 hours to restore the system from tape and get it operational again. I don't know what happened to the security guard

 

[respice finem]

I'm sure they made it look as an accident

 

[somebodyelse]

Tractor feed

Implicitly included with the dot matrix and line printers, but now we're talking about it we can extend to multiple layers of different coloured paper for instant carbon copies, and microperforations for removing the tractor feed edges to get back to a standard paper size.

 

[somebodyelse]

I don't know what happened to the security guard

Nothing I hope. The person who wrote and/or approved the instructions on the other hand...what possessed them to think #2 was a sensible thing to give to a security guard, let alone #4?! I hope the last part of the restore included writing a small script to be run by the new user for the security guard.

 

[Petrushka]

Years ago a friend of mine (RIP) serviced IBM(?) line printers, and told the story of one feed failure he had to fix that would FILL the entire room it was in with paper in about 1 second. He said it was one of the most frightening experiences he'd had, and that was after serving in Vietnam in the 60s.

Not a printer failure, but I once had a core dump delivered on a hand truck. On the whole, I prefer blue screens.

 

[Martin Takamine]

Carbon paper and interoffice memos.

S

The chemical smell of the page the teacher is passing out that is fresh off the drum copier.

 

[Berwhale]

Implicitly included with the dot matrix and line printers, but now we're talking about it we can extend to multiple layers of different coloured paper for instant carbon copies, and microperforations for removing the tractor feed edges to get back to a standard paper size.

I once had to vacuum clean the insides of an IBM PC Server 500 that had it's intake fans located directly next to a large and very fast printer in distribution centres loading bay. The 'sprocket dust' spilled out of the 500 like sand when I took the side off, it made quite a mess