You consider this a downside? Customer-facing IT Support is an absolutely nightmare. It's part of my job, and by far my least favorite part of the job, as the customer is more often an impediment to solving their problem than an asset.
At any rate, I much prefer dealing with users to dealing with printers. Printers are evil. I remember the time one of our engineers wanted to print a PDF file, and the result looked superficially the way it was supposed to, except every single letter was incremented by one (so "ABC" became "BCD")... Or the time two printers were configured with the same IP address - due to ARP caching lifetime, every couple of seconds, clients would switch which printer they would send pages to, so print jobs ended up literally being all over the place. ;-)
There's a saying about dogs, that one should not be scared of the dogs, but - if at all - of the owners. I guess that kind of applies to printers, too. ;-)
Because of gravity, toner eventually falls onto the laser lens, and causes low-quality prints.
Thus, it has a manually runnable "self-clean" procedure, in which an internal squeegee runs over the lens, cleaning it. For a bit.
If they had made the laser downwards-shooting, it would have avoided this problem altogether. The printer company's service technician, who showed us the self-clean, tells me that this would make the packaging larger, however.
The printer is a gargantuan office printer. (Kyocera TaskALFA 5550ci)
I don't think packaging size for merely the laser should have been a concern...
tl;dr printer hardware can definitely suck
But like I said, hardware-wise, they haven't given me much trouble (except for a power supply with very slight fault, causing it to make kind of chirping noise every once in a while - it drove our accountants crazy - our field service guy tried replacing the hard drive, the heater, and some other thing (I forget which one), before finding the faulty part). Also, trying to print on paper that is just ever so slightly wet can be... interesting, if one happens to need to print out some one hundred pages. sigh
A couple of years back, when I was still working as a programmer, I was once given the task to write code controlling a specialized printer, the kind used in factories for printing bar codes on things. The printer used a continuous stream of ink that normally went into a tube feeding it back to the ink tank. The ink contained tiny iron particles and went through a magnet that could direct it to the position it should land.
When powering off the printer, the software controlling it had to make sure to first send the command to move the ink-catching tube right up to the nozzle before shutting down the pump, or else the printer would ... kind of soil itself. ;-)
Of course, the first time I tried to actually print something with that printer, I forgot to shut down the printer properly, and it soiled itself in a big way. Specifically, the stream of ink went through a teeny-tiny hole in a small diamond platelet; when I shut down the printer impromperly, ink stuck to that platelet and dried up, so that tiny little hole was no longer perfectly circular. As a result, whenever I tried to print something, the machine would soil itself some more.
After talking to the manufacturer's customer support repeatedly (in their defence, they were friendly, helpful and competent), a support technician told me to remove the platelet from the printer and put it in a bath of MEK (industrial-strength solvent) over the weekend to dissolve the dried remnants of ink (after I had cleaned that platelet manually several times).
The solvent was fairly volatile and highly flammable, so I put it in a small jar, dropped the platelet in the jar and screwed the top on as tightly as I could.
When I came back on Monday, the platelet was indeed clean and gave me no trouble whatsoever after that. The plastic coating covering the inside of the jar's top, however, had "molten" almost completely.
I seem to recall that the original story about how Richard Stallman was inspired to create the concept of free software was that he was stymied by proprietary software in a printer, so this would simply bring the concept back to its roots, so to speak.
Certainly it' s a double-edged sword but that's how I read it at least.
No, the reason why that comment is strange is that if I’m a sysadmin, the users who use the systems that I keep running are my customers just as much as customers of the company. Why would you not count them as customers?
Maybe the article author liked having contact with people outside the company, as a sort of social interaction substitute? If that’s the case, I can only say that if I needed social contact that badly, all I needed to do was to go outside after work, where I could socialize on my own terms with people I could choose for myself. But I can only speculate about what the author actually meant by that comment.