This happened at a mid-sized office where I was doing contract support. Call it $OfficePlace.

I get a ticket from a user, let's call her Margaret. Subject line: "Printer broken again." The word "again" is doing a lot of work there.

I walk over. Margaret is in her late 60s, very calm, clearly someone who has made peace with technology as an adversary rather than a tool.

I ask her to show me the problem.

She sends a print job. Nothing happens. She looks at me like this is exactly what she expected.

I check the print queue. Job is sitting there, status: paused. I clear it, resend. Prints immediately.

I ask her how long this has been happening.

She says "on and off for about four months, but only certain days."

I ask which days.

She thinks about it and says "never on Tuesdays, Tuesdays it always works."

I stare at her. She is completely serious.

I spend twenty minutes looking at the printer settings, the network connection, the driver version. Everything looks fine. I cannot reproduce the problem. I tell her to call me next time it happens and I'll come take a look in real time.

Three days later she calls. I walk over. Job is paused again.

I look at the print queue and notice the default printer had been quietly switching itself between two devices with almost identical names. $Printer and $Printer (Copy 1). One was connected. One was not. Something in her machine was rotating between them on no schedule I could identify.

I delete the ghost printer, set the correct one as default, done.

She nods slowly and says "so it wasn't Tuesdays specifically."

I told her it was not Tuesdays specifically.

She seemed genuinly disappointed. I think she liked having a printer with a schedule.

I added a note to the ticket. Wrote: ghost printer, user coping mechanism: calendar-based acceptance.