Well yesterday I needed to print out a document so I tried to be conservative and decided to print double-sided. Well the printer in my office isn’t very sophisticated so if you want to print double-sided you have to print all of the odd pages first, and then flip them over and print the even ones. But it was a 26-page document so I thought that I would give it a try.
Well I tried to print the 13 odd pages, but nothing happened. Sometimes it takes a while to print from Acrobat so I waited a little while longer. Then I went and futzed with the printer. No dice. So I tried printing again. Nothing. I turned the printer off and then back on, and then tried printing just the first page. Nothing. Checked the print queue. Empty. Then it hit me. I had to use the computer in the lab two days ago because our admin guy was installing some software for me on the machine in my office. And apparently while I was in the lab, Windows (or whatever wonderful software we use to maintain profiles) took the liberty of updating the printer settings in my profile, despite the fact that I hadn’t printed anything. So after a quick walk down the hall to the lab, I found all 27 pages that I had printed. I took them back to my office, reset my printer settings, and printed the even pages. I’m not sure what happened with the last two pages , but they ended up coming out on new sheets of paper.

In the end I wound up with:

  • 11 - double-side pages
  • 4 - single-sided pages
  • 13 - pages from my second print attempt
  • 1 - page from my third print attempt

for a total of 29 pages versus the original count of 26. Thanks Microsoft. I can use the extra 14 pages for scrap paper, but it was still a frustrating experience nonetheless. I suppose that I should have checked my printer settings before printing, but I didn’t think that they would be reset because I didn’t print anything. Oh well.