not panicking yet!

[schmerica]

People, I am in a tizzy, and I ask your advice.

I have a paper due this afternoon. This morning, I went to print it out; it printed one page and then jammed. I fixed the jam, and it said it was continuing to print. It did nothing. Since then, that print job has been in my queue, listed as "pending." Nothing I have done in the hours since has changed this. I tried disconnecting the printer from my laptop. I tried restarting the printer. I tried restarting my computer. Attempting to cancel the print job changes the status to "Deleting - Printing", where it has now been for many hours. Trying to print the file again does nothing, as it simply goes behind this job in the queue, and this job will never finish.

Do I have any options here besides emailing the professor to see if she will take it as an email attachment?

EDITED TO ADD: CRISIS AVERTED. Sometimes doing the same thing over and over and flailing helplessly DOES work! Good to know!

(Another fun fact about Erica's Day in Academics: my linguistics professor apparently decided to just not show up for the final this afternoon. As in, the entire class sat in the empty silent classroom for over an hour before someone ran down to the linguistics department to ask them what we should do and they sent us home. The working hypothesis is that she thought the exam time was 3pm and not 1pm, but considering how many million times she reminded us during the last class to double-check the exam times on the website, it is not a particularly good excuse.)

Comments

[cranberryink.livejournal.com]

Do you have a computer lab on campus where you can print stuff? I'd put it on a disc or a flash drive or something and take it to another printer. Maybe borrow a friend's or even go to a copy place. Black and white printing is usually only like $.10 a page or something.

That being said, your prof should take it as an attachment, unless she's a luddite/dinosaur.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

The problem with that is, uh, I do not have a dollar in cash right now for printing, which is why I didn't go that route to begin with! But speshope has stepped up and said she'll go to the lab with me to print it out, so I have that as a backup now, yay.

[cadi-b.livejournal.com]

What if you uninstall the printer, restart, and reinstall the printer?

[cereta.livejournal.com]

That being said, your prof should take it as an attachment, unless she's a luddite/dinosaur.

Well, no, because if the prof grades on paper, that puts the burden on her to print it out, which doesn't sound like a big deal, unless you have fifteen students doing that, and suddenly you're in a position of essentially hard-lining the issue or drowning. Not, you know, that I've been in this position, or the reverse where I want attachments and have students who refuse to learn how to send them and insist I accept hard copis.

That said, I would say that emailing the prof and attaching the paper, and asking if she can accept it in good faith until you are able to get it printed, should be fine. I will frequently accept such things.

[speshope.livejournal.com]

speshope must be getting on her way unto grocery shopping, so please do contact her if you want to take her up on her offer.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

This is a case particularly where I feel awful about the littlest inconvenience to the professor, too, because she's really been ridiculously generous with me this entire quarter.

But, uh, luckily the printer magically decided to start working! So it's okay!

[swamp-dragon.livejournal.com]

Maybe the professor is lying in a ditch somewhere? It's what my mum always assumes about me when I don't show up...

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

That is not quite what I did, but it seems to have started working anyway. So, uh, yay?

[cereta.livejournal.com]

Yay!

And ya know, situations like this are why I tell my students that generally good work and studentship pays off. There are plenty of students who, if they came to me with such a tale of whoa, I would say, "Eh, get it to me next class; I won't be grading tonight anyway." And then, there are the students for whom I would just roll my eyes and say, "I guess it kind of suck to be you then, doesn't it?" Yes, I have actually said that. But see, I'm sure you're the former kind of student ;).

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

It's possible, I guess, but I think the "thought the exam was at 3" is a more likely option.

[cadi-b.livejournal.com]

Yay, pearl! It probably could sense your frustration. Printers can be like horses. Or... not, but it makes me feel better to think that way. ;)

[swamp-dragon.livejournal.com]

I was trying to give her credit for not being a dink.

Ah, well, now the class can hold it over here for whatever's left of the semester.

[cranberryink.livejournal.com]

I've had plenty of profs ask for electronic copies of papers so they can use Word's "track changes" feature to do all their grading. I guess it's a matter of preference--some teachers are more attached to paper print-outs still.

[cereta.livejournal.com]

*nods* For me, it depends on the class. I mostly require electronic submission, but in my business writing class, that got to be a problem, so I require hard copies. The key, though, is just that whatever the prof's preference, submitting it some other way can create significant extra work.

[cranberryink.livejournal.com]

Yep. Everybody wants to minimize extra work for themselves, whether it's the prof or the students. Both think that their preferences should take precedence.

Ah, school. So glad to be done with you! Um, not that it's all that different in the business world...

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

*grins* Quarter system. What's left of the term = two days, filled up with exam slots for other classes.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

I think it's fair for the burden of the extra work to be on the students. I mean, I might bitch about little details sometimes, but I do it in a way where I know I'm being unreasonable and just ranting to hear myself, really.

[cereta.livejournal.com]

Everybody wants to minimize extra work for themselves, whether it's the prof or the students. Both think that their preferences should take precedence.

Well...yes, except that the extra work for one student of submitting a paper in the manner requested can fairly easily turn into five or ten or twenty students' worth of extra work for the teacher, which was sort of my original point. However unreasonable a student thinks it is for a teacher not to make an exception in her/his case, odds are pretty good that his/hers the only printer that jammed or ran out of ink or whose computer crashed or whose internet connection died, etc, etc, and the amount of extra work for each student to submit the paper as requested is significantly less than what will get piled on the teacher if even a quarter of the average class does not do so. I mean, it's basic math, here: one teacher, fifteen to twenty to a couple hundred students.

[cranberryink.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's totally fair for the students to get the extra burden. I mean, they're there to learn from the teachers. It's kind of a jedi/padwan thing--the padwans always get to do the extra work. ;-)

[cranberryink.livejournal.com]

I totally agree. All I said was that nobody wants extra work, but if there's extra work to be had, the students definitely get it. It's what they're there for.