I forgot the first rule of tech suport

Ring ring. Ring ring.

"[bussiness name], good morning, me speaking, how may I help you?"

I recently started a more tech support kind of job, and while I'm still learning about our specific software, we do get clients who call in about their printer not printing.

Which is what happened today.

It was a relatively busy morning, with calls coming in as soon as office hours started. Never a good sign. So with calls flowing through one after another, I picked up the call of this tale, where a stressed girl cursed at the printer that (again) would not print, or printed only white pages.

So I started with the obvious, unplug and replug said printer.

Didn't work.

So I remoted into her pc, saw a blocked printer queue of 20~ documents, cleared it and had her reboot the printer again for good measure.

No dice.

So I checked the settings, tried printing a testing page... Etc etc. Eventually I even reinstalled the printer and it still didn't work.

The computer saw the printer just fine. And for some reason every time she disconnected the usb and plugged it back in, the printer would spew out empty pages.

I was dumbfounded. I was at the end of my rope.

So I called a coworker, who suggested everything I had already checked, and then that I should remove the printer, restart the pc, and install again.

"Oh. Yeah! We haven't tried that!" Piped up the girl

"Tried what?" My confused self asked

"Restart the pc!" She replied cheerfully

And thus, a computer was rebooted, a printer started printing again and all was right in the world.

Ring ring. Ring ring.

"[bussiness name], good morning, me speaking, how may I help you?"

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TL;DR: Never. Never Ever. Never Ever Forget about rule 1: "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" On ALL devices.