I am sitting here in Istanbul airport, waiting to board a flight. Thankfully the internet is working great and because of the long layover we got lot accomplished sitting in a Starbucks.

I wanted to write about my printing experience  during last week. Those who know me also know that I am paperless and hardly print. I had to print the salary letters so I could write a note to the LTS staff in their letters. It needed to be printed in color because of a signature in color. I was told that the best place to print is the Community printer in Clapp Library.

First step, I had to install Papercut. I was very happy to see the documentation here. It is detailed and well done! One of our staff at the reference desk helped me through it. I was racing against time, so I was a bit impatient with the install, which required several steps, but I attributed that more to me than poor software design such as “Do you really want to install this?” (Why ask such a question?, puhleese)

Then started the problems. The staff member inserted the letterhead in a tray from which it was supposed to be picked up, which didn’t work. However, I needed to give a username and password on my Mac everytime I printed (which I went ahead and saved for the long haul). But to release it every time, I needed to provide my username and  password (about 15 characters long) in the printer. It was annoying, but I understand why.

We spent some time trying to tell the printer to go to that tray with the letterhead. It didn’t work. I seeked the help of another LTS staff member, which didn’t help either. Finally, we did it the old fashioned way by opening another tray (great job guessing which it was) and feeding it there. Great. Some papers wasted, but progress.

Nope. It was not printing in color. Another few papers wasted in trying to diagnose the issue. Print first to PDF and then print – OK, not a bad idea. But then you needed to specify everytime that it is color. OK, fine. Then papercut, so environmentally conscious, asks “Do you REALLY want to print in color?” and then reminds us to save ink and paper and all that. So many popup dialogs and having to confirm!

Finally when we thought we had it, it started printing in duplex. You sure don’t want to save paper in the case of salary letters by printing two letters on the same sheet of paper, even if the two staff members share the same office! One of my staff revealed the deep secrets of getting to a setting where you needed to tell Mac to turn off the duplex printing for this particular printer. But, it needed to be set before every print job. Then someone revealed yet another obscure method of making it stick!

In the process of trying to cancel the duplexed letter, one of us pulled the paper drawer open which made the printer mad. So, we moved to a second printer and it took us some time to figure out  which tray and so on and so forth. Finally, victory at last! We got it done.

Moral of the story: If you use papercut in public computing facilities, stick to defaults – black and white, duplex printing on the white paper that is provided. This is probably true of predominant number of print jobs. Any variations, be prepared for some work and a bit of frustration. Don’t try to do anything last minute thinking that it will all work out. No, it won’t, believe me. I am so tempted to suggest a short password, but no, I won’t! Of course, if you don’t print, you don’t have to worry about this – and I won’t recommend such avoidance solutions either…

All the kidding aside, I am SO THANKFUL to my staff who helped me through this! Without them, I would not have met a commitment I had made.

However, it also raises an important point – many software have a long way in simplifying the user experience. And, those of us who make decisions to adopt these software have an obligation to go through them just the way our users do, to understand and appreciate what they have to go through. Not the way an advanced user or an administrator experiences, but how a regular user does. Of course, all of us experience software differently, based on our own expertise.

But, this was worth experiencing what an end user goes through. And you are right, I will be having some conversations about “can we simplify any of these?”, Please?