Happy New Year everyone :-)
Although I planned to kick off 2009 with a much more inspiring article, I finally couldn't help it. I bumped onto a Digital Misfortune of such proportions that it was just impossible to resist the temptation.
Either it's me who is totally stupid or indeed software nowadays is designed by a blood-thirsty sadist mafia that plans to rule the world by killing all intelligent beings, or to be more exact, leading them to willfully commit suicide by banging their head on a wall, unable to stand the stupidity that surrounds them any longer. Some rock band had a song called "Mandatory Suicide"; now I think I finally get their message.
About a year ago I bought a nifty HP Photosmart C7280 All-in-One printer for my Vista PC. It was basically OK. Then at some point I installed Office 2007. All was well until the day that I tried to color some text, which is something I don't do all that often.
Ooops… Word crashed… Vista suggested that it searches online for a solution, so I said who knows let's take some chances. I mean I never ever had any useful results from any of Vista's suggestions, but hope never dies.
Sure enough Vista was absolute in its verdict: This is a known problem caused by the HP drivers when an HP printer is the default printer. Please make another printer the default printer until a fix is provided by the manufacturer.
Wow64! Way to go HP! I mean how many users around the world would have this HP printer, on Vista and use Office 2007 all combined together? About a handful I guess, so they probably missed that corner case.
This explains the situation below, where Microsoft XPS Document Writer is sadly configured as my default printer:
This of course means that every time I wanted to print anything I had to remember and select the appropriate printer from the print dialog. Usability nirvana!
Now, I bought just one printer. Why would the HP installer install two printers? Never paid much attention to it, but it is important later in our story so I make a bookmark of it here. I always printed with the "C7200 series" since the Fax was named in the same way, so I thought this is the best choice. This printer was intended for home usage, so not that much printing took place.
However there were two issues:
- For every page printed I would get an empty page.
- All pages had the text "[none]" lightly printed diagonally across the page. Didn't bother me that much, so I decided to postpone fixing for later.
I am not sure if you noticed the big picture:
I bought an off-the-shelf product, meant for any end user, made from an established brand and since Day One I had 3 major usability issues that rendered my product almost unusable.
The day came and today I decided to fix the 2 problems that I could fix.
Searching the web for the empty page issue I came across a fantastic discovery. You actually have to open printer properties, Advanced tab, click the "Separator Page…" button, and on the little dialog that shows that there really is NO separator page click "OK"!!!
It shows up as empty but it is not really empty I guess. Of course I had gone that far on my own, but I have the bad habit of pressing "Cancel" on dialogs where I change nothing. Here comes the first banging of my head on the wall. Thank heavens I didn't click OK during my investigations. Then the problem would appear magically fixed and I would have to bang my head even harder!!!
So I just clicked OK and the "empty page" problem went away! Superb technology!
Before I move on, let's rewind one bit and see things from the simple user's perspective. When I first opened the printer properties and went to the Advanced page I got the following:
Clicking on the "Separator Page" button was kind of problematic in this situation... I thought that this must surely be an UAC-thingy although there is no little Vista UAC icon on the dialog indicating to me that this is the case. I started to investigate, but it seems there is no way to start up Control Panel as administrator. A little while later I noticed this:
I was totally dumbfounded. The menu was right there all along, at the beginning of the menu, but I had never seen it despite the countless times I opened the Properties entry which was all the way down. Now doesn't that strike you as a bit odd? Not to mention the duplicate menu items! Way to go! I don't know about you but I tend to think that it would be wiser to have the UAC icon inside the tab pages, so that simply clicking it would enable all restricted functionality.
So problem one is gone. Now let's move to the diagonal "[none]" issue. Here starts the great fun. For starters I was sure this was not an MS Office thing. All apps would print this way. So it had to be in the printer drivers. First I meticulously and repeatedly checked all the options in the printer settings dialogs. I mean this is an obvious thing right? There should be some setting to control it. Nope. Then I opened the HP utilities. Still no luck. So I decided to search the web.
Although trying to search for pages containing the exact term "[none]" is quite funny, soon enough I found that the thingy printed on the background of my pages is called a "watermark", which of course I knew as a term but failed to reverse-pattern-match it. So the HP online help docs stated that I should have an "Effects" tab and from there control the watermark.
However my properties dialog looks like this:
There is NO "Effects" page! And of course none of the existing tabs had anything related.
Then I thought that my printer actually is a C7280 not a C7200. The property pages come from the printer driver so I thought maybe I could update to a more specific driver and get the page to show up. No luck there too.
Then, in a moment of genius unprecedented in the history of mankind (ok maybe I am slightly exaggerating) I thought "What if I open up the property pages on the other silly C7200 printer?". Surprise!
Hey, this dude has an effects tab! Here is what it looks like:
Finally!!! The watermark settings are uncovered! However, if you think I was done, keep dreaming. I am talking about sophisticated sadism here. I click on the "Edit" button and get this dialog:
Under great exhilaration I clear the Watermark Message, click OK and off I go to print a page!
"[none]" was once again printed on the page, but I could only read "You are a sad case".
I reopen the properties, effects, watermark, and sure as heck the "[none]" text was still there!!! I couldn't believe my eyes! Did I accidentally clicked Cancel instead of OK? I tried again and again but this sadistic piece of software would allow me to delete the text of the entry only to bring "[none]" back from the dead every time... Both sad and sadistic...
So I said ok, I will enter a space and get it through. I couldn't see any other workaround on the dialog, they even disabled the Delete button. Or maybe I could set the text to a dot, the font size to 1 and hope no one notices :-D
As soon as I typed the space some magic happened:
Wow64!!! The watermark message is the watermark name too, so now I have an invisibly named watermark.
Needless to say, this DID the trick.
I don't know about you guys but this is evident to me:
This is not moronic design. This is intentionally sadistic design.
This is design made so that people get conditioned to expect they will need support services and of course once conditioned, also pay for them. Instead of complaining about the crappy product the users will turn into happy, support-paying customers.
No wonder I get so many calls from friends and relatives to "visit them because they have such a long time to see me and oh by the way if I could look into one little problem we have with the computer".
But I have long gone past the stage where I dreaded these visits. If even I feel stupid and enraged after my encounters with these off-the-shelf end-user products, then they must probably feel much worse, so I better lend a helping hand.
Have Fun (while you still can)!!!
This is a great article... it made be smile. I've never had the exact difficulties you've encountered, but I did manage to kill more than one printer by doing seemingly harmless things. I do not share your conclusion that this design is sadistic, however. As we know: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
You should probably consider adding a Google +1 button to your website - I'd have +1'd this.
Posted by: itai | September 21, 2011 at 04:00 PM