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I should've called in sick yesterday. We were beset by a non-stop series of technical problems *all day.* In fact, one of those issues was still ongoing as I typed this.
Right off the bat, we found out our online ordering portal is offline company-wide. That meant no one could order any print jobs, nor could we see any existing orders. wonderful! That on it's own puts us nearly dead in the water, since we can only work on whatever we already have downloaded.
I then attempted to start a print job I'd set up the previous day. The test copy went through fine, but when I upped the quantity to 400, it got stuck in the print queue. The only way to clear it is to shut down the machine and the print controller and restart both. This happens from time to time and is annoying but not usually a major issue.
But this time? The print controller did not finish booting. It was just displaying the Windows logo and a spinner. I had moved on to something else and by the time I realized it hadn't booted it'd been sitting on that screen for at least 20 minutes. (No, it didn't say it was installing updates).
I rebooted it again, and this time it went into an automatic recovery mode and attempted to reinstall the print control software, only to encounter a fatal error.
Terrific! Now I have to place a service call on it. I did so, and called our tech to let him know.
In the meantime, we got word from one of the customer's buyers that they're having trouble placing an order. We told them to just email it since the system was down, only to find out that their system was also down and they couldn't generate a PO for the order.
By now, we've been furiously spinning our tires for over an hour and gone absolutely nowhere.
The technician showed up, and let's me know it's a good thing I called him, because guess what? The dispatch system for the technicians was down and he never got the call I'd placed!
Now we're up to three systems and a print controller down. What else can go wrong????
Well, the print controller had to be re-imaged. That's at least a four hour job. By now, the job we'd been running on another machine had finished, so I moved my job to that machine. It got through 397 of 400 and then threw an error code, stopping the machine and forcing a restart.
After restarting, the machine did not sync up with it's print controller, so I had to restart again. This time it synced up, but when I resumed the job, the color registration had gone to hell creating a bright, ugly aura around everything!
Luckily that only required a quick recalibration, but damn! Give me a break already!
But wait, we're not done yet!
Around 3, the technician tells me he has to stop for now and come back the next day. You see, he got through the first two discs on the re-image, but when he inserted the third DVD, it wouldn't read. Eventually he realized that a blob of glue had gotten stuck on the data side of the DVD.
In other words, he accidentally destroyed the optical drive on the print controller!
So now he has had to replace the optical drive and then start the whole re-image over again. He finished as I was going to lunch.
Today has been better, so far....*knock on wood*
Right off the bat, we found out our online ordering portal is offline company-wide. That meant no one could order any print jobs, nor could we see any existing orders. wonderful! That on it's own puts us nearly dead in the water, since we can only work on whatever we already have downloaded.
I then attempted to start a print job I'd set up the previous day. The test copy went through fine, but when I upped the quantity to 400, it got stuck in the print queue. The only way to clear it is to shut down the machine and the print controller and restart both. This happens from time to time and is annoying but not usually a major issue.
But this time? The print controller did not finish booting. It was just displaying the Windows logo and a spinner. I had moved on to something else and by the time I realized it hadn't booted it'd been sitting on that screen for at least 20 minutes. (No, it didn't say it was installing updates).
I rebooted it again, and this time it went into an automatic recovery mode and attempted to reinstall the print control software, only to encounter a fatal error.
Terrific! Now I have to place a service call on it. I did so, and called our tech to let him know.
In the meantime, we got word from one of the customer's buyers that they're having trouble placing an order. We told them to just email it since the system was down, only to find out that their system was also down and they couldn't generate a PO for the order.
By now, we've been furiously spinning our tires for over an hour and gone absolutely nowhere.
The technician showed up, and let's me know it's a good thing I called him, because guess what? The dispatch system for the technicians was down and he never got the call I'd placed!
Now we're up to three systems and a print controller down. What else can go wrong????
Well, the print controller had to be re-imaged. That's at least a four hour job. By now, the job we'd been running on another machine had finished, so I moved my job to that machine. It got through 397 of 400 and then threw an error code, stopping the machine and forcing a restart.
After restarting, the machine did not sync up with it's print controller, so I had to restart again. This time it synced up, but when I resumed the job, the color registration had gone to hell creating a bright, ugly aura around everything!
Luckily that only required a quick recalibration, but damn! Give me a break already!
But wait, we're not done yet!
Around 3, the technician tells me he has to stop for now and come back the next day. You see, he got through the first two discs on the re-image, but when he inserted the third DVD, it wouldn't read. Eventually he realized that a blob of glue had gotten stuck on the data side of the DVD.
In other words, he accidentally destroyed the optical drive on the print controller!
So now he has had to replace the optical drive and then start the whole re-image over again. He finished as I was going to lunch.
Today has been better, so far....*knock on wood*
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