I do basic IT support and got a call from someone saying the office printer had been “shrinking everything” for two weeks.

Not one document. Not one app. Everything. Emails, PDFs, forms, random screenshots, the whole lot. She said it like the printer had developed a personality problem and was now deliberately making documents tiny out of spite.

So I remote in and ask her to show me what happens. She opens a PDF, hits print, and the preview is basically a normal page surrounded by enough white space to rent out as a studio flat.

I check the print settings. Scale: 25%.

I ask if she changed that recently and she immediately says no. Very firm no. The kind of no where you know this machine has already been blamed in several conversations.

I change it back to 100%. Print preview looks normal. She goes quiet for a second and then says “oh, so it fixed itself?”

No. It did not fix itself. I fixed the tiny little number that had been telling it to make everything tiny.

Then she says she thought zooming out on the document would “save paper” when printing, because if it looked smaller on screen, obviously it would print smaller too. Which, to be fair, is almost logic. Bad logic, but logic.

The best part is she still asked if I could “keep an eye on the printer in case it starts doing it again.”

So now I’m apparently monitoring a printer for signs of relapse after it spent two weeks obeying instructions perfectly