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The CIA recruited those who specified the DECwriters for that office, and kept it at 50°F (10°C). Everyone eventually breaks under torture, but torturers who have no empathy for their victims are really hard to find.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I had a Epson 9 pin for years very long ago. Worked as long as I had it. I don't recall any problems. Never needed service and I wasn't even taking care of it that well.
Still working when I upgraded to a HP Laser which I only did so for the print quality. That HP Laser also lasted for years until I upgraded for color.
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Office Space!
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
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Never had a problem with my old LQ-850, WAY back in the day.
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I found Epson to be one of the better inkjets, with no feed problems unless you use the really cheap / thin paper - I switched to 90gsm as my standard and never had a problem with jams.
What I hated was the half an hour clean / purge / test print / swear cycle I had to go through each time I needed to print, plus the Epson fun and games of cartridge expiry / not recognised. So I threw it to the recycle centre and got a Samsung laser which I plug in, print, and unplug - it works every single time and it prints faster. I think it's cheaper to run as well given how many ink cartridges I binned.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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This is what I ended up doing as well, except I made the mistake of buying an HP laser. Overall, I'm happy with it, just dumb that when you scan it goes to the "cloud" and emails it back to you...
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milo-xml wrote: when you scan it goes to the "cloud" and emails it back to you.
I really wish you weren't kidding ... 
Mine no longer has a scanner - the "Documents" setting on my phone does good enough for me. The last scanner / printer was an Epson and it annoyed me because it wouldn't scan unless it had ink in all cartridges. Another moment.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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My guess is that rather than have firmware on the printers that checks for copyright infringement and trying to copy money, they check it server side when it goes to the "cloud".
I've seen the option to scan documents with my phone, I'll have to give that a shot in the future
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Nope, all scanner / printers have built in "money detectors" to prevent them working like a photocopier ...
Apparently with some models, just trying will deliberately brick them.
I found out about this when Herself had a thief at work: I wanted to OCR all the paper currency in her purse so if it went missing we could say "it was these serial numbers" and nick the cow who did it. But you can't scan currency and I wondered why. Google "EURion Constellation" if you are interested - it's pretty simple, but very effective.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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So that's what it's called. I work in printing and some of our educational work has them in there to prevent photocopying. We actually had a complaint on Amazon about a book we printed. Turned out it was a knockoff, lol.
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kmoorevs wrote: all the test pages I hadn't cancelled came streaming out
I had to fix a printer for a friends mother a few weeks ago - simple fix, just press "OK" on the printer - but first I had to cancel the 83 copies of the same document in the print queue ... 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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tl;dr
A bad cable on a parallel dot matrix printer caused a still unexplained error that cost two days of frustration to disagnose and correct.
Years ago I spent a weekend helping a client install new accounting software and uploading their financial data from the old system. On Sunday we printed all their financial statements and compared them to the reports they had printed on Friday. Everything was good.
Two weeks later they gave me a call. The balance on one of their monthly reports was out by 10 cents. The balance was supposed to be $15,260.00 and it appeared that way on screen. The printed balance showed $15,260.10,
I could not find anything wrong with the software or the data. We hooked the printer up to another computer that ran the same software and it still produced the wrong printed total.
We printed several other documents with no problem. We printed other statements (where the balance was not .00) and they worked fine. That led to another couple of hours down a dead-end rabbit hole.
Okay. So computers are good, software is good, data is good, printer is good (except for the extra dime). What is the problem? After two days of head scratching I finally decided to swap out the printer cable. The discrepant dime disappeared.
I have no idea how a bad parallel cable between the PC and the dot matrix printer could cause such and issue.
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I once had a VCR where I did something like that. In my case I didn't want to spend the ammo, so I used a sledge hammer. Very satisfying, even though I had to sweep the entire garage.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I've had good results with Brother colour laser printers. The previous one lasted about 8-10 years (can't remember exactly), and this one has lasted 2 years, and is still going strong.
(I hope I haven't jinxed it, now  )
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Agreed. I have a B&W Brother laser printer, and it just keeps working. And no fussing with ink cartridges, for the amount that I print a single toner cartridge can last a few years without having to worry that the ink will dry up...
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Just an aside - I’m an old-ish fart (~60 y/o) and have been making a conscious effort to reduce or eliminate printing whenever possible. Never really been the tree hugger type but I am fairly frugal and prefer a clean desk. At first, every time I thought about printing something I’d gave it some serious thought… 80% of the time I’d end up not printing and going a different route. Now its a much lower percentage because I almost never think about printing.
I’m not trying to talk anyone out of printing or implying that you don’t need to. Certainly not virtue signaling. Just waxing nostalgic I guess. Again “old fart”…
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An anecdote about printer. In a big company, having offices all over the world.
A young woman had newly joined this company and was having trouble with printing a document 📄. Seated next to her cube was a young guy who was one year old in this company. This guy wanted to impress her. Though this was the job of the IT folks, this guy spent more half of a working day in configuring her system to get the printout properly. Not sure what both of them filled for their timesheets, though.
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How long have you been together? 
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I was in a different department, and this story was on the rounds in our office, as a case study of non-productive time.
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A lot of paper handling problems come from the paper characteristics, many times based on how much moisture the paper absorbs from the environment before it's used. Try changing to a higher (or lower) paper weight. If you're being conscientious and using paper that's from recycled sources, you might try non-recycled. The more expensive (naturally) inkjet-specific papers are coated to enhance ink adhesion and control dot gain (drops expand on impact).
Most of the inexpensive home printers don't adapt well to a wide variety of substrates. Their paper handling mechanisms are also fragile and wear quickly, which means you replace the printer when a ¢25 rubber wheel wears down.
If you only print rarely, laser is a better option.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Back in my day, we had to use a hammer and chisel.
Nothing succeeds like a budgie without teeth.
To err is human, to arr is pirate.
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I needed a printer for general home stuff and the bit of occasional work, went through a load, HP (burnt out!), Xerox just plain died after I printed out my Uni-project (over use?), Cannon didn't like A4 (?) & currently on a laser from Samsung still going but complains about the imaging sensor being life expired bit a Googling turns out its a known issue and shorting two contacts with a 470K resistor resets it. No problem other than that. I think all issues are from converting the digital media to physical.
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I second using more expensive paper.
Many, like 30 years ago I had a nice Epson ink-jet (~$500!). After some years of light use, the feeding started to fail. I bought a cleaning kit which included a solvent-like liquid that put back some tackiness/removed glaze from the roller. Things were much improved. However, I doubt your printer is old enough to need this treatment.
I literally put the thing in the trash because the cartridges failed so often when I was travelling a lot and there were long periods of non-use.
Now I have an HP laser CP1525nw, which is ok except when you have to reestablish a WiFi connection.
I recently started using the manual duplex feature and was having many failures. I switched from low-tier paper to Hammermill 20 and 24 # paper, which claims almost 0% jams and it has not had a single failure. With the 24#, when you print a 15 sheet document, you do feel like you're holding an entire tree in your hand. The 20# has worked just as well.
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What could be wrong? I swapped USB ports on the PC...nothing...not even a ding...
OK, that's a clue! Even though the other end of the USB cable was plugged in, it was plugged into the RJ-45 jack on the printer!