In Defense Of: Campus Printers

The administration worries about many of our futures. They see some of us choosing to devote our time to disciplines like anthropology, Slavic literature or any of the other humanities or languages or social sciences that do not lead to set career paths or at least to the development of useful skills. This is not supposed to be a professional university; it is supposed to be a community of learning and knowledge for knowledge’s sake, blah blah blah.

And yet, the administration hears some of us discussing our future plans (those vague ideas about law school or academia, dedicating our lives to our art, our music or our writing, and, of course, saying we can always go into finance if all else fails), and it becomes nervous. It does not want us to burst out of the Princeton bubble with no skills on top of our rock-bottom grade point averages from the Princeton Departments of Nonsense. So to prevent this, the administration has developed our cleverly crafted system of campus printers.

Their plan is fivefold. First, each printer is carefully spaced just far enough away from any other on campus — far enough that it requires an excessive amount of effort for the average Princeton student to move from one to the other, but close enough to the majority of students on campus that it makes more sense to use a campus printer than to buy a personal one.

Second, each printer breaks down frequently enough that it is a common experience for a student to have to deal with this problem but not frequently enough that the student gives up on campus printers altogether.

Third, there is usually only one printer at each location, so that a student is forced to deal head-on with the printer malfunction instead of simply avoiding the problem by using a second printer. If there is more than one printer at a location, the majority of the print jobs will, of course, still be sent to the malfunctioning printer.

Fourth, it takes the Office of Information Technology more time to come and fix the printer than any student is willing or able to wait (i.e. longer than 5 minutes). Fifth, the OIT Printer List is designed to lure students into a false sense of security, in the belief that the printer they are approaching will be functioning, only to have it break down the moment they try to use it.

Finally, the printers are specifically manufactured to consistently have problems much more complex than the basic printer jam, problems that require special technical skills and expertise, the types of problems that cause students to spend hours opening and closing and pulling apart and putting back together the numerous components of a printer until there are tears and rage and the wielding of sledgehammers again and again against those black wheel-thingies and gray plastic covers until they are smashed again and again into tiny little pieces and there is a noise like screaming and the black blood oozes out and . . .

But why are campus printers so faulty, you ask? It is because the administration wants us non-engineers to be forced to learn how to deal with any mechanical problems a printer might offer. Through repeated exposure to printer breakdowns, we are supposed to develop the technical skills that we refuse to pursue in our academic careers.

The administration has two reasons for this decision. One, they hope forcing us to develop skills related to the engineering of a printer may lead us to develop a love for technical engineering and decide to turn away from the dark path of ambiguous “knowledge” to the sanctified path of the indispensable engineer before it is too late. (They are aware, of course, that this is unlikely.)

Second, they know the real-world importance of printer knowledge. They see us a couple of years from now, straight out of college, working our “temporary” jobs at CVS (or Payless Shoes or Dunkin’ Donuts or McDonald’s) “until we can figure something better out.” We think that our fancy degrees will be what propel us into the stratospheres of success. But one day when our manager is having difficulties printing a customer review or a memo from the administration we will rush in gallantly on our silver horses of printer knowledge with our sledgehammers and our rage and fix everything. With every magically fixed printer comes a promotion, and before long we will be assistant manager and then manager and then a member of the administration and finally president and CEO of CVS (or Payless Shoes or Dunkin’ Donuts or McDonald’s or whatever). And it will all be thanks to those Princeton campus printers.