Many of us has to deal with evil office printers at work, some more than others. It's bad enough dealing with printer errors, "'PC Load Letter'? What the fuck does that mean?", paper jams, etc – but some people seem to feel the need to add themselves to the list of possible printer problems. Here are some things that you can do to avoid being one of these work-place annoyances:

• Don't walk away from an empty printer – If you used up all the paper or toner, fix it. Add paper. Add toner. Whatever. If you don't know how to do these, then you shouldn't be using the printer.
• Don't walk away with someone else's prints – Double check that you have your print and only yours before walking away from the printer with a stack of paper. There are few things more frustrating than trying to track down who stole your printout.
• Try not to monopolize the printer – unless it's in your own office, it's not your printer. If people are frequently waiting for your print jobs to finish so they can get their own, you're abusing your printing privileges (and most likely printing way more than you need to be. STOP KILLING TREES!) If you really need to do that much printing, ask about getting your own printer.
• Leave printouts that aren't yours in the 'output bin/tray' – Once again, if it's not yours, don't mess with it. There are people that I work with that think they need to take other people's printouts out of the output tray and set them on top of the printer. Unfortunately, this leads to papers getting knocked off the printer by other people, or by pages coming out of the printer. Just leave them alone!
• If you put in colored or special paper, take it out when you're done – most people don't want to walk to the printer and find out that they need to reprint their important *whatever* because someone left 4 sheets of salmon colored paper in the printer.

The list could go on and on – but the general idea is: be considerate, be responsible, and don't mess with stuff that isn't yours.

Have an addition to the list? Add it in the comments below. 🙂