True story:

Worked IT in schools and I used to roam around different schools as a self-employed contractor. I would work one day or one half-day at each school, then go home.

At one of the schools I'd just started working for, I walked into the finance office and a woman was meticulously laying a piece of blank paper in-between two cheques (big A4 pre-printed blank cheques that the bank supplies), over and over and over again.

I ask what they're doing. I presumed that she was, e.g. printing a real cheque and then printing a duplicate of that cheque on plain-paper for record keeping. Nope. Apparently they "have to do that" because the software would print two copies every time and they aren't allowed to issue cheques that aren't used, so they can't print the duplicate onto cheque paper, so it would have to be destroyed if they did that.

And so they have to alternate cheque paper with blank paper, hundreds of times over, every month, to pay all the suppliers. Including me. Because they paid me by cheque too.

I didn't think much of it. I was usually pressed for time because schools couldn't afford me, but one day weeks later I was back in that office with the same person, and she was doing the same thing, and I had time that day.

I asked her about it. She demonstrated it on some cheques that she had to print out (it was hard to test because the software was permanently "issuing" that cheque number so you couldn't really test things without screwing up her accounting or having to call the bank to cancel the duplicate cheque in case someone tried to cash it, etc.). I dug into everything. Apparently she wasted HOURS every month alternating the paper to go into that printer.

She told me that the borough support (who supplied the software, computer and printer) had looked at it dozens of times, nobody was able to get to the bottom of it, that they'd taken her computer away many times to try to resolve it, that it was just the way it was.

I'd gained her trust over the months I'd worked there, though, so with her sitting watching what I was doing, I tried it myself and she was right. No matter the software settings, the Windows printer settings, etc. it would always print two copies of the cheque, one after the other, every time.

Touched the buttons on the printer and had it print a test page? Fine. One copy.

"Do you do anything else on this printer?"

"No, because it's the only one that can print on the cheques, and we have to do this to the paper each time, so we only ever use it for cheques. We have another printer for everything else."

So I printed a fresh Word document with just the word "Test" on it to the cheque printer.

Two pages, both with Test written on them.

"Would you like me to fix it?"

She then gave me a big long story, about how everyone thought they would be able to, how so many people had taken a look at it, and how they were all so cocky as I was, etc. etc. and told me it had been like that for YEARS. But go on, you do it, fix it then if you're so clever (but she said it in a friendly way).

So I went into the printer's front panel menu (it was an old HP Laserjet with the CFD screens). And I changed "Copies: 2" to "Copies: 1" on it. The printer itself. Not the computer. Not the Windows settings. Not the software. The printer.

Printed from Word. One page.

Printed from the cheque printing software. One cheque.

Printed 10 cheques from the cheque printing software. Ten cheques. No duplicates.

The woman damn near leapt on me trying to kiss me. Forever more, she never had to layer cheques and paper, or redo a batch when she'd mis-layered them, or start cancelling hundreds of erroneously-printed cheques in the software and with the bank, etc.

After that... every time... 1 cheque. No further copies. Done. She ADORED me after that, even thanking me for that exact thing when she retired years later.

Nobody, in all that time, had thought to look at the printer's own display / settings where it quite clearly said Copies: 2 on one of the settings.