A squirrely problem...

So I was flipping through open work orders at work while eating lunch, trying to get the number down before my boss gets back tomorrow morning, when I ran into one work order, regarding a printer, that made me go "huh" and run across the hall to our helpdesk to ask the guy who put the ticket in if what he put in the ticket was correct.

He said it was, but I didn't believe him.

Until I went to the printer and saw that the display really said what the user said it did.

I even took a picture of it with my phone now that I've finally figured out how to use the camera feature.

It turns out that some guy wrote a perl script to send messages, and it got posted on Digg and got a bunch of attention. It also turns out that it can easily be cleared by power cycling the printer.

Part of me is annoyed that someone is screwing around with our equipment and making our department look bad, and wasting technicians' valuable time. But it was kind of funny, easily reversible, and makes a great blog post. There are certainly worse "hacks" that could be done.