This is pretty embarrassing. You would think that this kind of thing wouldn’t happen to an IT professional, but it does. At least it does to me.

My HP LaserJet 1012 which has been serving me faithfully for about 2 years now suddenly stopped printing. Whenever a print job was received, the printer would fire up, rollers would spin, click 3 times, and give up, unable to pick up a sheet of paper from the tray. I figured maybe the rollers had worn out since I had sent some high volume print jobs for my last few classes, pumping out the equivalent of 3 textbooks on that little low-end consumer grade printer.

Luckily, I work in IT and am friends with a vendor that repairs office machines. I told him about it and he instructed me to bring my printer in to the office where he would take a look at it.

Well, I brought it in today. He had a befuddled expression on his face as he disassembled the printer. “Have you ever seen this before?” he asked me, holding up a comb that I had lost track of some time ago. Incidentally, it was of the same color scheme as the printer.

A blush rose to my cheeks and I laughed nervously, “uh, yeah… that’s my comb.” I mumbled some lame explanation about how it was sitting next to the printer and how I had no idea how it got inside the printer.

He said that it’s common for foreign objects to get mysteriously sucked into printers. I’m guessing that the comb got placed on top of the manual feeder, pushed inside inadvertently and sucked in when I tried to run a print job. It was funny because he was just about to consult his manual to identify this strange part. After all, it looked almost like it belonged in there with the same colors as the printer itself. Maybe that poor little comb thought he was returning to the mother ship.

Now I know how our computer users feel when they realize that their problems are a direct result of “user error.”