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Gary comes back from lunch surprised. No one told him Claire was training. His round face twists up so gnarly that his beard can’t even hide it. The twisting stops and lands on a toothy smile. He extends his hand to Claire and says, “Welcome to the printer bench.” Gary keeps talking—it is a flood of things, tips about the phone system, tips about solenoids and pick-up rollers. None of it makes sense to Claire.
Joel laughs. This stops Gary from talking.
Joel asks Gary if he can handle the phones for the afternoon while Claire is being trained. Gary says, “On it, chief.” And on cue, the phone rings. Gary goes to his bench and picks up the call.
“Part of printer repair is answering Tek support
calls,” Joel says, and tells Claire he will teach her that tomorrow. Then his voice drops to below a whisper, and he says, “Don’t listen to Gary about printers.” He says it so fast and low, Claire wonders if she imagined it.
An intaker named Chaz plops a medium-size laser printer on Joel’s bench.
“The paper tray sticks like a mofo. The owner says the printer prints great, but the drawer is driving her totally nuts. Can you take a look at it now? If you can’t, just tell me what I should quote for?” Chaz adds the last part as protocol. Joel already has hands on the plastic latch of the drawer.
A shrill scraping squeal sounds as Joel yanks it open.
Joel grabs a silver tube from his bench and shows Claire how to grease the track of the tray. He slides the tray in and out, distributing the grease till it glides silently with ease.
“It’s a no-charge repair. Tek doesn’t sell silicone grease, but the customer should try to buy some because the squeaking might come back in a few months,” Joel says to Chaz, and adds, “Have you met Claire? She’s the new printer Tek.”
Claire turns red and gives a little wave, which is less a wave than an easy way to get her hand to her forehead to cover her eyes.
Joel explains that the LaserWriter II was discontinued almost ten years ago. But Tek always encourages people to fix them. Always. LaserWriter IIs are tanks, one of the most solid printers Apple ever made. The printer has only one design flaw, one thing that consistently breaks, and that flaw takes ten years to surface. Joel pauses for breath. Claire is on the edge of her seat.
He concludes, “The fan blades warp a little over time and suck in dust. This dust eventually gets into the optics and causes pages to ghost.”
Claire prints a test page from the LaserWriter II. The edges of the paper are bright white. They stipple to a black stripe of text in the center, in a kind of reverse ice cream sandwich.
Ghosting is a term used to cover a host of printing problems—double images, an image seen through the backside of the paper. Here Joel uses “ghost” to describe printing so faint it has not actually printed.
“I hate this repair. You have to take the whole thing apart. Vacuum and wipe the dust all the way bloody down,” Joel says, pulling out a tan vacuum with a trolley of attachments and a long hose.
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