BOFH: This printer engineer knows every trick in the book

Summary

EPISODE 14 The morning coffee in Mission Control is interrupted by a hesitant tapping at the door. Our current office temp has an issue."It's the printer," she says, apologetically. "It makes a noise.""When it's printing, or all the time?" the PFY asks. "Sort of both. It starts making the noise before it starts printing, then keeps making the noise for about 20 seconds after." The PFY and I pop out and take a look, and the printer is indeed making a tiny squeaking noise, from the time it wakes up until the time it lapses back into low-power mode."I know it's hardly noticeable, but the office is so quiet..." she says."Leave it with us," I say."So you can fix it?""A machine with an extortionately priced service contract, voided the moment we open a panel that we're not authorized to open?" I ask. "Not a chance!""Oh," she says, disappointedly."But what we can do," I say, moving a bunch of paper from my rarely used desk phone and pressing a speed dial button, "is log a fault."Barely 15 minutes later, I have negotiated the tricky maze of passages, all alike, which comprise the printer company's ancient IVR system, and am speaking to an actual engineer. "… and what's the serial number?" he asks.I rattle off the sequence of numbers that I took a snapshot of earlier."Oh no, that sounds like the controller serial number," he sighs. "I need the printer serial number. It's on the back panel of the machine, underneath the sticker with our support number on it. If you want to ring back when you get that I ca-""It's OK, I have that here," I say, having been to this particular rodeo a time or two before.Ploy #1 in the Printer Engineer playbook is to ask for the serial number. If the user actually has the serial number, ask for some other number, i.e. the FULL model number, the total page count, a 40-digit service number from the sticker – where the last two digits are mysteriously missing, etc. When they can't supply it, get them to ring back, endure another 15 minutes of ambiguou...