August 28th, 2019:

	What a week.. and we're only halfway through!

If you follow me on Mastodon, you'll have heard me joke about our shipping 
department's dot matrix printer catching fire.  It wasn't a joke.

Around 9:30 am Monday, our head shipper paged me to the shipping 
department.  The dot matrix printer he uses for printing shipping labels 
had spontaneously stopped working.  Thinking it was probably jammed again, 
I went back there expecting an easy fix.

No such luck - the damned thing had powered off and wouldn't power on 
again!  I checked the d-plug and parallel-USB cable and they were fine.  
Thinking I had a mechanical issue in front of me, I yanked the printer and 
ran upstairs to grab one of our "spares" in the server room.

I lugged the 20 lb printer back to shipping, connected it, and printed a 
test label... nothing but a hideous grinding noise occurred - gears were 
stripped.  Muttering angrily to myself, I disconnected the spare.  Our 
shipper reminded me that we had a spare printer in his cabinet that had 
been there a few years.  Rather than trudge all the way back upstairs to 
the server room, I grabbed this long-forgotten printer out of his open 
cabinet and hooked it up.

The thing was really dusty and looked like it had seen combat at some 
point, but it powered up and printed a test label just fine.

As I was gathering up the other printers, I smelled a strong ozone smell, 
then smoke... thick grey smoke was coming from the back of the printer, 
from the parallel port.  This wasn't just a simple blown component letting 
off a little smoke, this was a fully involved fire!

I disconnected the power then the parallel cable, then literally threw the 
smoking, smouldering printer twenty-five feet off the loading dock and 
into the pouring rain, to the shock and horror of our shipping department, 
several couriers, and a customer.

"Never seen that happen before!", said our elderly shipper, "are you 
filling out the Incident Report or am I?"

I told him I'd do it.

--

The best I can figure is that the machine was *so* dusty that a connection 
shorted in the parallel port, something sparked, and ignited years of 
accumulated dirt, dust, and paper dust inside the thing.  I filed the 
Incident Report, omitting the fact I'd *just* avoided hitting a courier 
driver who had been walking to the loading dock when I threw the printer.

My boss, the VP of Operations, phoned a couple of hours later.  He had me 
on speakerphone, and he was still laughing.  He had been reading my report 
and started laughing at the precise moment our President was walking by.  
He asked me to repeat the story in detail, barely managing to contain his 
laughter.

"Shaun," he said, "(President) and I agree that this is the type of 
incident that could only happen to you..."

Guess I'm making the highlight reel this month...

Now here's the *real* kicker:

I plugged the first printer, the one that had stopped working in the first 
place, and the damned thing started working again.  In fact, it hasn't 
given us any trouble since.

Fucking thing.