donutz's Journal: Personal Tech Support laugh...

So my wife's printer, a cheapo-but-good-o Canon i320 bubble jet printer, stopped printing today. It wouldn't pull in the paper, and it just was shooting ink at nothing. I yanked the USB cable and turned it off, and cancelled the print job.

I plugged it back in, turned it on...and I got some dreaded flashing error code from the power LED: long green, orange, orange, orange, repeat. Great, just great.

So I check the Help from the printer driver. Ha! As if they'd put helpful help about the printer problems there. Well, it was worth a shot. So I figured if we turn off the printer, computer, and everything, maybe that would solve it.

It didn't.

I opened up Mozilla Firebird 0.6, and went to Canon's website. Dug my way to the support area, and found -- huzzah! -- a list of error codes. Long Green, 3 short orange flashes -- Paper Jam! I now had a clue to help me resolve this issue.

Except that I was already quite certain there was no paper jammed in it. 'Well I'll show that printer,' I thought to myself. 'If it wants a paper jam, then by golly I'll give it one!' So I grabbed a sheet, and tried my best to stuff it inside. It's not like there's a lot of twists or turns for the paper to get jammed in, so it should have been easy to get some paper stuck in there.

"Should have" being key here. No matter how I tried, I couldn't get any paper stuck in the darn thing, not shoving it forwards through the paper feeder, or backwards.

Then I noticed something. With the front panel open...I saw something purple and glittery inside. I immediately knew what it was.

"Madison, did you put your worm in the printer?!" I shouted at our cat.

Let me explain. One day, nearly a year ago, I was cleaning out a box of old toys and junk that my parents offloaded onto me, and I found a rubber worm fishing lure. I tossed it at our cat, and at first it freaked her out (because it stuck to her fur, and she ran like crazy through the house till it came off). But then it became her favorite toy, and she'd carry it everywhere and play with it until it got chewed to pieces. So we bought her some new purple glittery ones.

Sure enough, she'd put one of them in the printer's paper feeder.

Well that explained why she kept walking on the printer all night, hitting the power button and turning it off and on over and over again.

So I guess Long Green, 3 Short Orange error code can also be a Worm Jam...make note of that, Canon!

It was a good laugh.