Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

This story starts with the worst mistake of them all – loaning a tool

Who, Me? Everyone makes mistakes, but only The Register celebrates them every week in "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column that shares your worst workplace moments then records how you bounced back.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Louis" who told us he once managed the IT operations at a leasing company.

"We made a lot of money leasing computer equipment, so the owner allowed us to buy kit that wasn't strictly necessary, but that was useful," he wrote.

Which is how the company acquired a color printer, to satisfy the marketing department's desire to illuminate sales presentations with fancy charts and graphs.

This story comes from the time before color laser printers. The machine Louis's company acquired therefore used what he described as "large blocks of crayon that were melted and mixed with fuser oil and deposited on the paper." That oil lived in a tank deep within the printer's chassis.

"One day the printer had a paper jam, so one of the marketing 'geniuses' decided he would fix it," Louis told Who, Me?

The marketing genius decided he needed pliers to do the job, so visited Louis's team and asked to borrow the tool.

"We thought nothing of it and he didn't mention what he was doing, so we handed them over," Louis wrote.

Whether the marketing genius fixed the paper jam is lost to history.

Louis, however, remembers clearly that he later found the printer broken beyond repair and with oil seeping throughout its innards.

"We think he turned the printer onto its side, or back, which sent the oil gushing out and basically shorted out the entire thing," Louis wrote. "It also made a huge mess on the table where the printer sat and took hours to clean up."

The company eventually acquired a new printer, and Louis made sure to equip it with a warning label which explained that if anyone outside the IT team did anything other than load fresh paper, it was a firing offence.

"The culprit was not disciplined for his misdeeds," Louis concluded. "And we never loaned any of our tools to any of the non-IT staff ever again."

Have you inadvertently contributed to destruction wrought by a colleague? If so, click here to send email to Who, Me? We promise not to break your stories when we share them in our pages! ®