Legal Sized Issues

A few weeks ago a directive came from IT central at headquarters stating that, in the name of uniformity, all networked printers in the company must have legal size paper in tray 3. Go Uniformity!

IT representatives dutifully went forth and configured tray 3 on all the printers in our building and loaded them with legal size paper.

Here in my little world of product development, where the requirement for legal size paper is almost nil, this decision meant that we had to go load paper in the printer nearly twice as often.

This was annoying, but it would have only reached the level of a sigh and a rolling of eyes except that IT also has the print server set to draw the cover page for a printout from tray 3. Now every cover sheet came out with 15% more paper.

I am no activist, but I abhor waste, so I took the initiative and had out own lab IT guy (who reports to us, not to corporate IT) change back tray 3 and put the legal sized paper back on the shelf.

Things were fine until this morning. Over the weekend, IT reconfigured the print server here (and no doubt company wide, they never think small) so that it no longer drew the cover sheet from tray 3. They changed it so that the cover sheet merely requires a legal size sheet of paper from any source before a document will print.

Why they did this, I do not know. Perhaps we accidently ordered too much legal size paper and need to get rid of it.

Now when I print, the print monitor tells me there is a problem at the printer. When I get to the printer, the LCD screen asks me to place legal size paper in tray 1 (the manual feed tray) so that it may proceed. I figured out how to work around the need for legal size paper at the printer itself, but it involves a few button presses. Not tragic, but we have a lot of people who print and forget, so I had to clear the way for three documents before I got my own printed.

Again, our lab IT guy managed to work around the issue, but I still do not understand why this was done in the first place.