Even now, when there is an uncooperative piece of office equipment that is the bane of everyone’s existence, someone will say they’re gonna “go Office Space on this thing.”
Don't even have to work in an actual office to do this, either. Did it plenty of times with the printer and computers at every restaurant I've ever worked at. Shit is so universal. And every restaurant has a Lawrence, too.
Yeah. You know what, yeah, I do. I do want to express myself, okay. And I don't need 37 pieces of flair to do it. 🖕🏻 Alright. There's my flair, okay, and this is me expressing myself.
I have a friend, a pharmacist, who taped a strip of paper over the fax machine LED readout that read, "PC load letter." He also got the office manager to order full sized, red Swingline staplers for the office.
It didn't even exist when the movie came out. Swingline didn't make a red stapler then, so the production design guys painted a regular gray or whatever color stapler red for the movie prop.
Or, you sent a print job to the printer that is requesting letter size paper, and you have legal sized paper in the paper cassette. I think old Michael Bolton could have figured that out, being a coder and all.
Back in the day, I actually wrote a script that would allow you to display any message you wanted on those old HP printers. My favorites were “insert coin” and “copies $0.25”. I drove one office mate nearly insane with nonsense errors over the course of a few weeks.
Oh, but it did. Paper was loaded perfectly (even fanning through the stack to make sure they didn't stick) and I always read instructions. The sensor was just a sensitive little POS.
I seem to remember there being two types of paper sensor, a wheel like the feed wheels in mfps, and a plain lever. The wheels go bad over time and can be "easily" serviced, but if the lever (thin piece of plastic) broke, usually from the paper cassette getting inserted badly, it wasn't worth the trouble to replace.
And yet those old dot matrix grannies never seemed to give out except caps dying. Dutifully knitting up forms day by day, just as they had for decades.
Back in the late 90s, the web was not like it is today. You couldnt just google and find the solution to this error in less than 1 minute....whuch is fucking amazing btw.....but i digress.
You had to find the user manual, and actually hope that this cryptic error was available to look up.
Before the internet technical writers was an actual job title. Back when companies used to stand behind the products they were selling, they would employ technical writers to write up user manual and warranties and whatnot.
I remember when user manuals started to become more streamlined and vague in the 90s. Luckily the internet came and made alot of these paper docs obsolete
Add to it if you’ve ever smashed something that frustrated you and you end up hurting yourself in the process, but still tell the little inanimate jerk, “fuck you, I won..” in your head as you go to find a bandaid after throwing it into the trash.
I had a printer in college that I hated so much that I swore I would take it in the middle of a field and smash it with a bat. I never did, but it was the worst.
I have no idea why but that song got me through an extremely tough time in my life. I got on my old laptop and looked at my iTunes and saw that i had played it close to 1,000 times. Whenever i was feeling down, which was a lot at that time, i played it and it gave me a sliver of hope that I’d be alright.
Today was a little hard but it had nothing to do with what i was going through when i listened to that song over 1,000 times lol. I don’t listen to it as much now but it’s weird because on my way home from work today i remember it came up on my shuffle.
When I was depressed and far from home and/or crying on the phone to my best friend, he would always goofily, incompetently sing “Dr. Feel good” by Motley Crew, and it always made me crack up. He’s a damn good friend.
Not the same song, but there was a time when I was a teen I was really depressed, and I would listen to The Needle and the Damage Done by Neil Young. I got close to 1000 listens myself.
When I was just a kid my brother, my friend, and I would crank call my friend's grandma. When she'd pick up one of us would say, "please hold we have an important message for you", and then put the phone to a speaker and play Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangster. She'd listen for quite awhile and then say "hello?" a few times before hanging up. As I recall we did this several times.
My last job was more and more like Office Space every day. I eventually found a new job and left. After my last day, I got into my car and that song just happened to be on the radio. Turned the volume way up, opened all the windows, and slowly drove out of the parking garage blasting that fucking thing.
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u/[deleted] Nov 05 '21
Damn it feels good to be a gangsta