Last Updated on December 3, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla
Ok, maybe it was operator error.. then again, maybe the user interface stinks.
I needed to fax about 5 pages to a client. I loaded the stack of papers into the Canon MX310 all in one machine. I thought I hit the fax button but I can’t be sure. Anyway, I put in the fax number – 15165551212 and hit Black and White.
I then went downstairs to do a bunch of other work which included sending about 5 more pages to the printer.
When I came back upstairs I saw that the whole input trays worth of paper had been printed with identical copies of the first page of my fax job.. It took me a minute or so to figure it out.
THE STUPID MACHINE WAS TRYING TO MAKE 15,165,551,212 COPIES OF MY PAGES.. Instead of seeing the number I entered as a fax number, it took it as the number of copies. Yep, somehow I screwed up and ended up trying to copy the pages instead of faxing them. I would think that there should be some logic in there that would put up a message like
“HEY STUPID… do you really want to make 15 billion copies of that document?? What are you doing, sending a christmas message to every person on the freaking planet?”
Nope, no such luck.. It dutifully tried to make the copies which would have amounted to about 75 billion pages total.. I wonder what kind of duty cycle the engineers at Canon expect.. One of these days I’ll have to do the math and try to figure out how long that copy job would take.
Oh, and the bad news… I’ve tried to kill the copy job a couple of times and it hasn’t died yet.. I’m a little leery of putting paper in and leaving it unattended.